Medicine: Case of the Flying Pig

Levitation, until now just a cartoonist’s gag, a magician’s stunt or a children’s trick, gained medical respectability last week with the publication of “the case of the flying pig” in The Lancet, most eminent of medical journals.

Even the softest mattress and smooth est linen are rough on patients burned so extensively that they cannot rest in any position without lying at least partly on a burned area; the healing, moreover, is much delayed. Another big class of patient that yearns for levitation is the spinal paralysis victim who gets bedsores. So the University of London’s Orthopedic Surgeon John T. Scales got the idea of supporting patients on air.

He called in the engineers who developed the Hovercraft (TIME, June 22, 1959), an amphibian that floats above land or water on a cushion of air. Eventually, they devised a “bed” with twelve 6-in. jets arranged four to a side, with two at each end, and through them they pumped 2,000 cu. ft. of air a minute. The inward-facing jets created their own curtained cushion from which the air escaped at a smooth, continuous rate, equal to the input rate.

Instead of a human subject, Surgeon Scales used a pig with the same weight as an average human trunk. A 2-in. by 2-in. piece of skin was cut from the anesthetized animal’s back. “The pig was then ‘levitated,’ ” Scales reports, about 1 in. above the bed, “until the wound was dry —a period of one hour.” Under ordinary conditions, such a wound would have taken 24 hours to dry and begin to heal. The pig showed no ill effects, and the fact that its temperature fell 7°F. while it was on the air blast was rated as favorable for recovery from an operation.

Surgeon Scales suggests that air-cushion levitation may be helpful in human patients by 1) reducing shock, 2) preventing loss of fluids by oozing from wound or burn areas, 3) quickly creating a dry, germproof “shield” over the wound, and 4) avoiding bedsores. How well a human patient would take to living on an upended wind tunnel, he does not yet know.