Medicine: What Ails Mossadeq?

How come Premier Mohammed Mossadeq keels over so often? As every newspaper reader knows, he is prone to fainting fits, weeping or taking to his bed. What ails the man?

When he arrived in Manhattan to put Iran’s case before the U.N., he checked in at a hospital instead of a hotel. After seven days on the 16th floor of the huge New York Hospital, Patient Mossadeq was discharged. The doctors’ verdict, as reported by the Premier’s physician-son, Gholam Mossadeq: there is nothing wrong with him that a good rest, regular meals and regular sleep won’t cure. In the U.S., he has been getting all three.

Electrocardiograms of the 70-year-old Premier were normal; all the X rays, blood tests and urinalyses were negative. The only exceptions to the doctors’ clean bill of health: a mild anemia, slight deafness and rather low blood pressure (100 systolic). His only treatment: vitamins.

Many a man with Mossadeq’s tantrum-my temperament would have had lifelong ulcers. Actually, says Dr. Gholam Mossadeq, his father hasn’t had one since his youth. Now he is the ulcer type, without the ulcer.

His public faints (caused by an inadequate supply of blood to the brain) are the result of his excitability, coupled with his low blood pressure and habitual overwork. Says Gholam Mossadeq: “My father is not really ill—just nervous and tired from too much work. In Teheran he works from 6 in the morning until n at night.”

With his U.N. task (and Manhattan rest cure) at an end, Premier Mossadeq plans to head back to Teheran and overwork this week.

*Ambassador Ernest Gross, U.S. delegate to U.N.