A Grand Complication by Stacy Perman

Author:Stacy Perman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Game Over

In November 1926, a year after his first surgery to remove the tumor, Ward’s cancer returned and he checked himself into the renowned Cleveland Clinic. For weeks, Elizabeth made the sixty-mile trip from Warren, sleeping at the nearby Bolton Square Hotel, returning home occasionally, but only for half days. While the doctors cared for Ward’s body, Elizabeth tended to her husband’s spirits, making sure that he received his correspondence, supplying him with news from home, conferring over his ongoing treatment, and reading to him. Mostly, however, she just kept him company with her steadying, pleasant presence.

Ward had not chosen the Cleveland Clinic randomly. Some years earlier he had become interested in the Clinic’s novel multidisciplinary medical practice, dedicated to education and research. Its founders, led by Dr. George Washington Crile, established the hospital in 1921, after serving in the Lakeside Unit during World War I. Deployed in the spring of 1917, the Unit tended to more than eighty thousand Allied troops near Rouen, France, over twenty months. Intensely ambitious and curious, Crile, the son of Ohio farmers, had already earned international standing as a physician when he opened the Clinic. One of the first surgeons in the United States to use blood transfusions, in 1903 he also designed a pneumatic rubber suit to control blood pressure and prevent patients from going into shock during surgery. (The device was later used during World War II to prevent pilots subjected to high gravity forces from blacking out.) On the battlefields of Europe, he introduced new methods of preventing infections. Upon returning home, Crile and his battle-hardened fellow medics, Drs. William Lower and Frank E. Bunts, along with a local internist, John Philips, decided to build a practice resembling their combat experience, one that included every branch of medicine while integrating research and direct patient treatment; they founded the nonprofit Cleveland Clinic Foundation. The endeavor struck a deep chord with Ward, and he became one of its benefactors, donating $200,000 (roughly $2.6 million today) to the Clinic.

From the outset, the Cleveland Clinic pioneered a number of new fields, such as x-ray therapy, endocrinology, and orthopedic and neurological surgery. When Ward arrived, surgery continued to be the foremost treatment for cancer. Radiation as a medical treatment remained in its infancy. With great foresight, the Clinic’s founders used a portion of their initial building funds to purchase a gram of radium and installed a radium emanation plant that produced radon seeds, the first such plant in the Midwest. Still, in these early experimental days, the ability to accurately measure dosages often made the cure worse than the disease. With radiation therapy reserved for inoperable or recurrent tumors, its use earned grim notoriety as the “last hope.” As Ward entered this bleak stretch of the disease, he still believed that science and technology had the answers to improve everyday life and health.

At the Clinic, the engineer’s own body became a laboratory. While the Clinic’s physicists and radiologists developed the first dosimeter to accurately measure

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.