Medicine: Vampire

When 13-year-old Clara Howard of Washington. D. C. emptied a lapful of peanut shells into an open fire, the flames leaped up, licked her neck and sides. After weeks of painful healing she was left a hopeless cripple, with her chin grown to her chest, her arms to her sides. Prof. Robert Emmet Moran of Georgetown University saw the little Negro girl at Emergency Hospital last year, determined to try a new experiment in plastic surgery: a living graft from another person of the same blood group (TIME, Dec. 13). Clara’s distant cousin, John Melvin Bonner, 16, offered to risk his skin. Dr. Moran slit a strip of skin 16 inches long, half-inch wide, from John’s armpit to his hip. He rolled it lengthwise into a narrow tube, attached the upper end of the tube to Clara’s body. He assumed that John’s blood would nourish the tube until it became firmly rooted in Clara. He would then detach it from John, spread it and plant it on Clara.

Several days after the children were twinned Dr. Moran noticed that Clara was growing stronger, John weaker. Her red blood cells were increasing, his decreasing. As the tube stretched to 20 inches John grew sick and dizzy, finally developed acute anemia and lapsed into a coma. Giving up the graft experiment, Dr. Moran quickly cut the Siamese twins apart, found that Clara, like a vampire, had drained out John’s blood through a net of capillaries which had formed on John’s end of the tube. No capillaries had formed on her end of the tube, so she could not return any blood to the boy. Last week Dr. Moran told reporters that John, although scarred for life, was cheerful and uncomplaining, had recovered sufficiently to return to school, that Clara, still somewhat invigorated by the blood infusion, was given a few postage-stamp grafts from healthy parts of her body.