Medicine: Emergency Call

An idyllic spot on the busy wide highway from New York City to Atlantic City is the small town of Lakewood, N. J. There the flat, pine-wooded New Jersey terrain, its weather tempered by the nearby ocean, makes an ideal health resort for idling oldsters like John D. Rockefeller Sr.

Lakewood is also an ideal location for the Paul Kimball Hospital, for on the 75-mi. span of highway between Freehold, N. J. and Atlantic City there is no other hospital. Cracked-up joyriders keep Surgeon Robert Buermann’s staff of 15 doctors and 30 nurses busy all the time with lacerations, fractures, burns and shock.

Sixteen years ago the U. S. Navy established a lighter-than-air base at Lakehurst, nine miles from Lakewood. Ever since then the Paul Kimball Hospital has had an added reason for existing. Whenever big airships like the Los Angeles, Akron, Macon, Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg were due to dock or depart at Lakehurst, the hospital knew the hour and, though not tense about it, all the staff knew that at such times an emergency call might come. The hospital’s telephone operator and the operators at the air base understood their roles perfectly, just in case.

When the Paul Kimball Hospital staff, at 7:23:45 p. m. last Thursday, heard the terrific dull boom from the direction of Lakehurst, everyone knew instantly what had happened. The air base operator’s horrified call was unnecessary. One of Medicine’s fiercest emergencies was at hand and the hospital’s operator immediately began mobilizing all ambulances and nurses on call in Lakewood and neighboring towns. Within 90 seconds Dr. Buermann and his own hospital unit were streaking for the field, their ambulance siren screaming through the pines. In 15 minutes they were at the side of Lieutenant Carl Green Jr., the Lakehurst naval surgeon, confronted with as horrid a batch of cases as Dr. Buermann ever saw even as a front-line surgeon in the War.

First thing, after shooting the tortured creatures full of morphine, was to douse their burns with any kind of oil or grease available&#151carron, linseed, castor, lard. Flame that had seared off clothes and hair had broiled away the skin in dangling strips. There were seared eyeballs, roasted lips and nostrils and tongues and throats to salve. There were fractures, concussions and all were in dire danger of lockjaw. Injections for that had to be given, and intravenous injections of glucose in water to counteract the dehydration of being roasted alive. The 26 worst cases, including the Hindenburg’s three Captains (Lehmann, Pruss and Sammt) went to Dr. Buermann’s hospital at Lakewood. Others were sent to hospitals at Point Pleasant, Pinewald, Neptune, Newark, Manhattan.

From Manhattan a man called Dr. Buermann on the telephone: “Do everything you can for Dr. Lehmann. Spare no expense.” Dr. Buermann, replied: “We are doing everything we can. Money does not matter.” It was William B. Leeds Jr., rich playboy, quick to try to help the commander and friend with whom he had made several pleasure trips. But Captain Lehmann was beyond helping. In the Lakehurst hangar, under the grey belly of the old Los Angeles, embalmers worked on the 31 passengers and crew who were killed at once. Captain Lehmann’s oiled body was carried there, placed in a grey coffin like the others.

The German Consul in Manhattan begged his good friend, Dr. George Winthrop Fish, Park Avenue urologist, to get special help for Captains Pruss and Sammt who seemed to be dying at Lakewood. Dr. Fish immediately enlisted Dr. Allen Old-father Whipple, Columbia University’s Persia-born professor of surgery. Professor Whipple immediately arranged for the transfer of Captains Pruss and Sammt to Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Centre where every resource of modern medicine was promptly mobilized to save them.

Sprays of tannic acid (TIME, March 22) were used to coagulate the surfaces of their bodies and prevent evaporation of their vital juices. Pints of blood were pumped into their veins, and all the glucose solution they could stand. Oxygen too was necessary, for noxious gases generated by burning fabric and fuel oil had poisoned their lungs. Between Life & Death their chances were even.

After four days, practically all Hindenburg patients had been discharged or transferred from the small New Jersey hospitals. In Dr. Buermann’s hospital remained only seven of the original 26. The emergency was over. From now on only the regular grist of motor accidents would come in. But next month Dr. Buermann will renew an old interest upon the arrival of John D. Rockefeller Sr. to whom he is June-to-September personal physician.