Foreign News: The Foreign Scalpel

For months the Shahinshah, Mohamed Reza Pahlevi, has been suffering from severe pains in his royal stomach. The symptoms seemed to point to appendicitis. The Shah wanted to leave the country to have the necessary operation performed, presumably in Western Europe or the U.S. But with his country’s Nationalists screaming that anything the West could do they could do better (including running Iran’s oilfields), His Majesty decided it would be unwise politically, if wise medically, to seek relief abroad. He stayed at home and suffered. But recently the appendix got too troublesome.

Secretly the Shah summoned Dr. Claude Forkner of Cornell University to Iran and, on Forkner’s recommendation for an immediate appendectomy, sent off to the U.S. for New York Hospital’s Surgeon in Chief Frank Glenn, plus another U.S. surgeon, plus an expert anesthetist, plus three U.S. nurses.

One afternoon last week the Shah climbed into his No. 2 Rolls-Royce, set out for Teheran’s Bank Melli Hospital. As his car drove through the gates, loving subjects performed a ceremonial operation: they deftly sliced the heads off two sheep and tossed them under the wheels, which (according to old Iranian custom) would bring good luck.

At the hospital, the Shah, who looked pale and shaken, climbed into bed. His smartly dressed bride—who looked as though she had been crying all day—anxiously spent the night in the hospital. Next morning, the foreign scalpel flashed, and within two hours the Shahinshah was being wheeled down the corridor to his suite.

While His Majesty was on the operating table, he also had another matter taken care of: his physicians did a quick plastic surgery job on the scar which had marred his right shoulder ever since 1949, when he was shot by a nationalist fanatic who thought the Shah was too friendly with foreigners.