Medicine: Swollen Joints

Slap, slap, slap, for 3,600 times without a miss the fretting fists of William Ogden Heath, 27, of Garden City, L. I., struck the punching bag over his head. He was flat on his back, but not for virtuosity in bag punching. His hips and knees were stiff and painful from arthritis. Abnormal deposits of bone made them practically immovable. Drugs, vaccines, sun baths, oven bakings, changes of climate had done him no good. The disease had grown worse, and this backside bag hitting was an intelligent young man’s desperate effort to prevent his arm joints becoming swollen with the disease.

Except for the wit of his gymnastics, his was not an usual case of arthritis. Doctors know very little about the disease. Yet the Romans suffered from it, by the knobby bones of their skeletons, and the Greeks, the Egyptians, even the Stone Age men who lived in French caves.

William Ogden Heath’s case came to the attention of Dr. Fred Houdlett Albee, 52, great orthopedic surgeon, professor at both the New York Post-Graduate Medical School and the University of Vermont College of Medicine, an Sc. D. as well as an M. D.

Just as the War began Dr. Albee was demonstrating original methods of bone grafting in Germany, England and France. He kept on in the French military hospitals, and later in those of the A. E. F. His invention of replacing, by bone grafts, parts of the spine diseased by tuberculosis goes by his name.

Dr. Albee believed he could ameliorate if not cure the Heath case of arthritis. Plan: To open up the knee and hip joints and scrape away the freak bone formation; to line the knee joints to prevent fraction with fat and connective tissue from the thighs; to replace the excised, but normal, bones and skin. That is what he did.

And from that operation William Ogden Heath was recovering last week—painfully but hopefully.