Camera in Hospital

In Houston, Tex. month ago Scripps-HowarcTs up & coming Press bought its photographer, Francis ("Nig") Miller, a Zeiss Contax camera, turned him loose on the city to get "candid" shots. Bold little Cameraman Miller went about snapping the usual pictures of backstage doings and unwary citizens. His best layout was ''Houston at Lunch Time," displaying Houstonians munching salad, picking their teeth.

One morning last week Ed. M. Pooley, the Press's managing editor, sent his candid cameraman to Houston's well-equipped Memorial Hospital to get some operation pictures. Robert Garland Jolly, the hospital's publicity-wise superintendent, gave Photographer Miller a warm welcome, clapped him into a sterile white gown, cap and rubber gloves, ushered him into the operating room. There he snapped a series of run-of-the-mill slicings while Superintendent Jolly, surgeons and nurses gave him every assistance. Toward the end of the morning, as a patient was being wheeled away, Superintendent Jolly turned to Photographer Miller, remarked: "Now here is something special you might want to see. The next one is a Caesarean section."* Photographer Miller clicked eagerly while the patient was anesthetized, her abdomen opened, her baby drawn out feet first; followed through while the baby, a healthy 7 lb. boy, was removed, washed, footprinted for identification. When Editor Pooley shuffled through the results of the morning's work, he immediately pounced on the Caesarean pictures as most newsworthy. Well he knew that if he published them many a shocked busybody and upright citizen would berate him soundly. But he also knew that the pictures would be exciting news to almost all his readers, including the busybodies. Forthwith, Newsman Pooley splashed over the first page of his second section what were, so far as he knew, the first photographs of a Caesarean section ever to appear in a lay journal. Down on his head that day and for several days thereafter beat the expected storm of criticism. Irate citizens charged him with bad taste, with needlessly shocking his readers, with exposing to public gaze an extremely private and intimate incident. Especially voluble were mothers including one whose small son had brought the pictures into her bridge club meeting, asked for an explanation. But an equal number of citizens, including physicians, told him how interesting they had found the pictures, congratulated him warmly on a first-rate news beat. Editor Pooley remained convinced that he had made the right decision.

*The Caesarean section, for removal of a baby from the womb by means of abdominal incision when normal delivery is dangerous or impossible, is one of the most famed and spectacular of major operations. The classic Caesarean involves an incision from the umbilicus to the pubis, through the abdominal wall, peritoneum and uterine wall. The Caesarean section is named for Julius Caesar, who by legend was thus delivered from his mother. First actually recorded Caesarean on a living woman was performed about 1500 by a Swiss pig-gelder on his wife.

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