Cardiology: Five of a Kind

Young James McCIain was pathetically small and weak when he started his family’s procession into the Hillcrest Medical Center in Tulsa three years ago. The boy had suffered since birth from a narrowing of the valve between his heart and lungs, and a hole in the septum (wall) between the right and left upper chambers of the heart. Surgeon Joe Burge Jr. hooked the ten-year-old up to a heart-lung machine, closed the septal defect and widened the valve. Though still short, Jimmy is now a sturdy fifth-grader.

Next to appear was Jimmy’s brother Willard, who at 14 was dwarfed and partly paralyzed on his right side. He was a victim of the same kind of heart trouble. Since an operation by Dr. Burge and his colleague Edward W. Jenkins, Willard has grown a bit and has progressed to the ninth grade. Last March the boys’ mother, Stella Lee, followed them into the hospital for the same operation. In June her daughter Wanda, who is going on six, went into surgery. Wanda is now romping around and has started first grade.

Last week, Hillcrest cardiologists and surgeons completed their examination of an eight-year-old brother, Richard, and decided to schedule him for an open-heart operation that will make medical history: he will be the fifth member of his family to have surgery for virtually identical heart defects. The only other child, Josephine, who is seven, has been thoroughly tested and seems perfectly normal.

When a baby is born with a certain type of heart murmur and is later found to have these valve and septal defects, something must have gone wrong in the womb. But what? And when? Infections may cause some of the valve defects, but not the majority, and not the hole in the wall. What makes the impoverished Negro family from Vian (pop. 930), near the Arkansas border, so interesting to doctors seeking clues to the true nature of the trouble is the fact that four of the offspring had essentially the same heart defects as their mother, although they had three different fathers. Healthy Josephine will provide a valuable standard of comparison as the Oklahoma researchers try to find out whether infection or a hereditary defect passed on by the mother caused the damage to the children’s hearts.