Medicine: Heated Lungs

St. Elizabeth’s is the U. S. Government’s hospital at Washington for nervous and mental diseases. Whenever during the past several years any of St. Elizabeth’s 4,000 inmates showed signs of pneumonia he was at once put to bed. Nurses strapped a large tinfoil plate to his back, a similar plate to his chest. Wires led from the plates to an electrical machine. The doctor in charge—he was usually Dr. William Watson Eldridge Jr., 43—manipulated the machine to send a high-frequency current (1,500,000 alternations per second) through the puzzled patient’s lungs. The lungs heated up, like a coffee percolator. Capillaries and lymph channels dilated; blood flushed the lungs and carried away toxins; inflammation disappeared; congestion resolved itself.

Last week Dr. Eldridge reported that, in 250 pneumonia cases to which he applied this diathermic treatment, only three resulted in death. This was significant. After heart disease and cancer, pneumonia is the greatest life-taker in the U. S.

The treatment is practically specific for lobar pneumonia, declared Dr. Eldridge. This type of pneumonia begins with a sudden chill and fever. The crisis comes on ordinarily in ten or eleven days. The victim either recovers or dies quickly.If he is diathermized within twelve hours of onset, the heat treatment brings on the crisis within two hours—long before the average patient’s strength has been depleted. The longer the delay in applying the heat, the later the crisis, the less the certainty of recovery.

Bronchial pneumonia reveals itself only two or three days after the actual beginning of the disease. Hence the application of the high-frequency current must be tardy. Recovery is not so certain as when lobar pneumonia is attacked this way.

Diathermy for pneumonia is not yet well-known but it is not new. Dr. George Washington Crile of Cleveland uses diathermy to prevent pneumonia after surgery. He applies his electrodes over the liver and lungs. Dr. Fred Bernard Freeland of Portland, Ore. has made comparatively extensive experiments with diathermy. So has Dr. Adolph Abraham Lilien of Manhattan. Perhaps the most treatments studied by one man were the 8,000 which Dr. Harry Eaton Stewart of New Haven, Conn.,* analyzed.

*Author of Diathermy, with Special Reference to Pneumonia—Hoeber ($3).