Medicine: Out of the Fire

Of the hundreds burned in Boston’s Cocoanut Grove fire last November, all who had deep burns on more than 30% of their bodies died — except one. Last week that amazing survivor, a 22-year-old Coast Guardsman named Clifford Johnson who had 55% of his skin burned, was recovering. Doctors reported the treatment had made medical history.

Nearly half of Clifford Johnson’s body had third-degree burns. He lay on his belly for months, shrank from 168 to 112 lb.; two months after the fire he was all but dead. Doctors treated his burns with triple aniline dyes; they dosed him with sulfonamides, given internally, to control infection; they gave him a near-record number of 100 transfusions, half plasma and half whole blood.

But the most significant factor in saving his life, in the opinion of Dr. Charles C. Lund, who had charge of his treatment at Boston City Hospital, was feeding him with prodigious quantities of protein. In severe burns, the body loses large amounts of nitrogen, in the urine and by exudation from the burned body surface.

The amount of protein in Johnson’s blood fell from a normal 6.5% to 3.2%. To overcome this loss, he was fed the equivalent of three to five pounds of meat a day. Besides his regular meals, he got amino acids (milk protein) intravenously, was fed a special soup made from ground meat, eggs and milk by stomach tube. One of the chief medical advances that emerged from the treatment was a method of measuring how much nitrogen a severely burned patient needs.

To date Clifford Johnson’s treatment has cost more than $10,000, half of it contributed by the Red Cross for nursing. But his recovery has been of immeasurable value to U.S. medicine. Says Dr. Lund: “We learned more from Johnson about the treatment of burns than has been learned from any other single patient.”