Medicine: Racket Victim

In Manhattan’s colossal Bellevue Hospital last week, a famed heart specialist died. He was Dr. John Henry Wyckoff, 55, president of the American Heart Association, dean of New York University Medical School, professor of medicine there and attending physician at Bellevue. It was in the University’s anatomical laboratory that this leader in medical education and practice was found in collapse. A few days prior he had been questioned by Federal investigators of a serious insurance racket of which, like many an honest specialist before him, he had been an innocent fool.

The racket was as old as life and disability insurance. That it was able to involve such a man as Dean Wyckoff was testimony to the fine art it has become. The racket: fraudulent doctors and lawyers give a heavily insured “patient”‘ violent exercises, purges and doses of digitalis. When they achieve a plausible specimen of exhaustion and palpitation, they get his condition on record by hospitalizing him under a conspiring physician’s care. Cardiograms, sphygmomanometer readings, charts and reports pile up the evidence. Then comes the payoff: the certification of a reputable heart specialist, called in to examine the patient for myocarditis, a heart condition which disables the victim to his dying day.

For such purposes Dr. Wyckoff was ideal. His impeccable reputation, his potent offices were jury-proof. His fame, the demands of his jobs and of his practice made him just that more likely to take the evidence presented him in consultation at their face values, without waste of precious time.

When Manhattan police last week arrested a doctor, a lawyer and several solicitors and “victims” of heart disease, Dr. Wyckoff faced the amazing fact that he had been their unwitting accomplice. Chagrin and mortification are bad medicine for weak hearts, and Dr. Wyckoff’s heart was weak.