Tank Hospital

At the eastern boundary of Cleveland, conspicuously painted with glistening aluminum, stands one of the strangest hospitals on earth. The main building is a steel sphere 64 ft. in diameter, the height of a five-story apartment house. At the base, like garden slugs under a puff ball, are two horizontal steel tanks the size of bungalows. All three structures are built to withstand the force of compressed air in which Dr. Orval James Cunningham, the designer, has his patients live.

Dr. Cunningham, 54, originally from Kansas City, believes that organisms which live only in the absence of oxygen cause certain forms of diabetes, pernicious anemia, and cancer. To him, the logical treatment is to saturate the patient with oxygen under pressure, which theoretically permeates to the morbid organisms and kills them. The Bureau of Investigation of the American Medical Association, after due consideration, has denounced this theory of therapy as so much quackery. Nevertheless, Henry Holiday Timken, reclusive roller-bearing tycoon, had sufficient faith in Dr. Cunningham's ideas to give him $1,000,000 to construct his tank hospital in Cleveland.

James Henry Rand Jr., chairman-president of Remington-Rand (office equipment) had sufficient faith to entrust Mrs. Rand to Dr. Cunningham's aerotherapeutics. And their son James Henry Rand III, onetime University of Virginia medical student, had sufficient faith to understudy Dr. Cunningham for the past seven years.

Last week young Mr. Rand bought Dr. Cunningham's sphere for $500,000, will henceforth operate it with the help of Dr. Carl William Iuler, 36, as the Ohio Institute of Oxygen Therapy.

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