Diphtheria Hero

Complacently treading his Brooklyn "beat," Patrolman Salvatore Di Lorenzo, one year "on the force," heard the broken screams of a woman frightened & helpless. He ran--into the apartment of Mrs. Adelaide Lambert. Her two-year-old daughter, she cried at him, was choking to death from diphtheria.

As everyone knows, diphtheria, highly infectious disease, affects the throat. Germs, rod-shaped, breed there and give off toxins which cause the peculiar fever. Antitoxins can allay the fever. They are made by the blood of horses which have been methodically infected with diphtheria toxin. Such antitoxins constitute one of the few remedies which have a specific effect in treating disease. Without their injection the throat of a diphtheric child (most victims are from two to ten years of age) is apt to close up through the rapid forming of a false membrane across the air passage.

Patrolman Di Lorenzo knew something of all this. Five years ago, when he was driving a milk wagon on a Long Island route, he had seen a customer's child strangling in the same condition as was Mrs. Lambert's. Firemen had helped save that first child by means of a pulmotor. Patrolman Di Lorenzo remembered how the pulmotor worked. He placed his mouth to that of the child and sucked. A plug of mucous came loose; he spat it away. He blew into her throat, sucked; blew, sucked--until she could breathe by herself and live.

Said he later: "She was such a pretty baby, I hated like hell to see her die. When I got home I washed my mouth with lysol. I was a damn fool to do that. I couldn't eat for two days. No, I wasn't afraid."