Doctor's Doctors

Into an operating room of Manhattan's gorgeous Doctors Hospital famed diagnostician Henry Harlow Brooks, rotund and haggard, was wheeled last Sunday. Long a professor in New York University Medical College, unusually skilful in the treatment of heart disease, Dr. Brooks, 65, had just returned to Manhattan from Miami. Feeling uncommonly weary he at first decided that he had caught the grippe in the South. But three other able diagnosticians and three able surgeons, all six professors in their specialties, decided that their doctor-patient suffered with an abscessed liver.

Across Dr. Brooks's abdomen Surgeon John Frederick Erdmann, 71, cut a twelve-inch opening. Surgeons John J. Moorhead, 61, and Harold Denman Meeker, 60, functioned as assistants. Standing on stools and craning their heads over the surgeon's shoulders were Diagnosticians Alexander Lambert, 74; Emanuel Libman, 63; Harry Aaron Solomon, 42.

Surgeon Erdmann got down to Dr. Brooks's liver. At that point in an operation on an ordinary patient Surgeon Erdmann habitually turns to his audience, explains his intent, waits for applause. Over Dr. Brooks there was no such dramatic byplay. The surgeon swiftly lanced the abscess. Pus spurted out. In his intensity Surgeon Erdmann cut his own finger twice. Then he and his surgical team of professors speedily cleaned up Dr. Brooks's abscess, inserted a rubber drain, closed the incision.

Next day Dr. Brooks died. Immediate cause was not the liver abscess but a gas gangrene germ of which Dr. Brooks was co-discoverer some 40 years ago--the Welch bacillus, named for the late famed William Henry Welch.

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