Heart Tickler

Dr. Albert Soloman Hyman did not want to talk last week about the electrified gold needle with which he revives hearts stopped by shock. But a shipment of the needles and accessory generating equipment was coming into Manhattan from Germany, dispatched by Siemens & Halske who made the devices according to Dr. Hyman's instructions. The Press learned of this, asked questions.

The Hyman tickler imitates the action of the heart's "pacemaker." The pacemaker is a spot in the wall of the heart's right auricle. Here originates the stimulus which excites the normal heart to beat about 70 times a minute. Dr. Hyman's investigations told him that the stimulus is an electric current generated by the pacemaker. Ingeniously he measured that current, found it about one-thousandth of one volt.

If the stopping of the pacemaking current prevents the heart from beating, reasoned Dr. Hyman. perhaps the application of a commensurate current might jog a stopped heart. With the help of electrical engineers he rigged up a small generator which produces 40 to 120 impulses a minute. The current goes through a 5-in. gold-plated needle. The needle is hollow. Down its bore, carefully insulated, passes a wire to the open tip. The wire forms one contact point, the sheath another, for the tickling passage of the electricity.

Dr. Hyman shoves the needle through the patient's ribs until it pierces the right auricle of the stopped heart, then starts the generator. Six out of ten people "dead"' from shock revive, if they receive attention within ten minutes of "death."

For resuscitation in cases where the lungs stop working, Dr. Frank Cecil Eve of Hull, England, is recommending a marvelously simple method which he recently devised. He straps the patient on a stretcher, places the stretcher on a trestle, rhythmically teeters the stretcher up & down. The weight of the patient's viscera alternately pushes the diaphragm up & down, forces air in & out the lungs. Dr. Eve, who is consulting physician to the Royal Infirmary at Hull, 'finds this teeterboard respirator effective in acute diseases; it relieves the patient from any breathing effort. For infants a rocking chair serves just as well as a pivoted stretcher or plank.

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