Medicine: One Lung

Doris Yost, 3, was just another case of intrathoracic cancer when she entered Johns Hopkins Hospital two months ago. By last week, when her parents took her home to Keyser, W. Va., she had become a rare incident in U. S. surgical history —survivor of an operation by which an entire lung had been cut out.

Many a person has had a cancerous lobe of a lung excised. Many a tuberculous patient has had a useless lung collapsed. But only once has a U. S. surgeon cut out an entire lung with success. That was last April, when Surgeon Evarts Ambrose Graham of Washington University, St. Louis, removed a cancerous lung from a University of Pennsylvania obstetrician. Doris Yost had the good fortune to come under the bold eye of Dr. William Francis Rienhoff Jr., protégé and son-in-law of Johns Hopkins’ eminent Urological Surgeon Hugh Hampton Young. Surgeon Rienhoff found that Doris Yost had a cancer in the passage to her left lung, which would soon block off her windpipe and strangle her. Cutting out the entire lung offered her only chance for life.

Dr. Rienhoff took his chance and last week when the child left the hospital her right, uncontaminated lung had already grown bigger than normal. Soon the sole lung will fill her chest, supply all the air she needs.