Medicine: Skinning Convicts

The first U.S. skin bank was operating last week in a jail. Charles (“Reds”) McCullough, 20, who is serving 20 to 40 years in Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary for highway robbery, gave two big strips of leg skin to a little boy with bad burns around his knees. Daniel Dona hue (see cut), who last month gave skin for the second time to nine-year-old Evelyn Henderson, is serving life for murder.

So are John Costello and Thomas J. Caulfield, who have also given skin to burned children. The bank now has 50 blood-typed, physically fit convict members.

Though grafts from the patient himself have the best chance of success, there are cases (as in bad burns) when a patient has no skin to spare. Then the surgeon must resort to skin from a person of the same blood type. The convicts hope to be able to give skin to soldiers as well as children. With the idea of establishing a plentiful supply for this purpose, Dr. Herbert Maskell Goddard of Philadelphia, the penitentiary’s board chairman, who organized the bank, hopes to get other prisons to follow Eastern’s lead and “make this a national prison service.”