Medicine: Fruit-Jar Rescue

Called to the home of Louis Faulkner, in the tiny town of Idabel, Okla., last week, young Osteopath George Kenneth Fisher found Charles and Larrie, the four-month-old Faulkner twins, choking from whooping cough. Only oxygen administration could save them, but there were no oxygen tents within 50 miles.

With country-doctor resourcefulness, Osteopath Fisher gathered a tank of oxygen from the village welding shop, a quart fruit jar from Mrs. Faulkner’s kitchen, four pieces of rubber tubing from Mr. Faulkner’s garage. He filled the jar with sterile water, punched four holes in its cap and screwed it on. He ran one long tube from the oxygen tank through the cover and almost to the bottom of the jar. The other three tubes were stuck just far enough through to take the oxygen as it came off the water’s surface. Function of the water was to moisten the sharp oxygen which might otherwise irritate the delicate mucous membranes of the babies’ throats.

When the rig was ready, two of the outlet tubes he inserted into the babies’ nostrils. After they began to gasp again, he pulled out the nostril tubes, attached a rubber mask made from an old stomach pump in his instrument kit to the fourth tube, held it for a few minutes over each baby’s nose. In a short time their pinched blue faces turned red again and they began to breathe normally.

“There just wasn’t anything else I could do,” said 29-year-old Osteopath Fisher to reporters last week. “‘Red’ and ‘Black’ will come along all right now, I guess, but even after we had this thing rigged up they nearly died. A couple of times we had to put the tubes clear through their nostrils, directly into their lungs.”

In the Journal of the American Medical Association last week Dr. Walter Meredith Boothby and colleagues* of the Mayo Clinic published a complete report of their new doughnut-shaped rubber oxygen mask (TIME, Jan. 16). Oxygen administered in hospitals through cumbersome, complicated oxygen tents usually costs a patient $12 to $25 a day. Use of the small, neat inhalation mask, said Dr. Boothby, “should average only $5 to $8 a day,” and in certain cases a patient “can be taught the entire technique of administering the oxygen to himself at home.”

* Drs. Charles William Mayo, William Randolph Lovelace II.