Medicine: End of Patricia Maguire

After lying in a fitful stupor for five years, seven months, twelve days,* Chicago’s long publicized victim of sleeping sickness, Patricia Maguire (TIME, Dec. 2, 1935, et ante), died last week. In a trice pathologists of Northwestern University medical school took out: 1) her lungs, to verify the pneumonia which was the immediate cause of her death; 2) an ovary to examine the tumor which mysteriously developed a few weeks ago, caused her to waste away, reduced her resistance to the pneumonia; and 3) her strange, ineffective brain. Then she was buried with a fresh corsage of gardenias and the crystal necklace which her constant fiance, a jewelry salesman named James Burns, gave her. Her mother, Mrs. Peter Miley, whose second husband, like her first, is a structural iron worker, had kept a meticulous diary of her daughter’s 2,096 days in bed. The doctor in the case, Dr. Eugene Fagan Traut, a closemouthed, popular suburban doctor, counted on being asked to publish a sequel to the clinical record he has kept of the young woman’s stupor (TIME, April 15, 1935)

The front part of Patricia Maguire s brain with which she normally would have done her thinking was withered. A mid-part was scarred by an old inflammation. Both conditions almost totally destroyed her ability to move her head, eyes, jaws, tongue, shoulders, hips, legs, knees. The withered frontal lobe proved most interesting to Northwestern’s pathologists, for it was not directly affected by the attack of encephalitis lethargica which rendered the young woman inert. Dean Irving Samuel Cutter of Northwestern offered this explanation: “The first stages of encephalitis are sleep, paralyzing of certain cranial nerves, general weakness and acute inflammation chiefly affecting the grey matter in the midbrain region. The secondary effects are inflammation of the capillaries and lymph spaces in the brain proper, filling the spaces with cell debris and shutting off the brain’s nourishment. This causes an atrophy, or sinking and withering.”

*No record. In Westneld, Mass, lives Helen Louise Buschmann, 28, unconscious since a bus struck her Jan. 15, 1928.