"Interesting Experience"

Medically the most valuable of all testimony about a disease is that given by a doctor who has suffered it. Instructive to doctors, therefore, was Dr. Harvey Cushing's account of a mysterious infection which paralyzed him for a time during the War (TIME, May 11). Equally instructive last week was Dr. Lucien Daniel Clark's account of the "interesting experience" through which he had just passed. Dr. Clark, 70, a Cleveland surgeon, was stricken with apoplexy and paralysis year and a half ago.

"While returning from a professional call," reported he in last week's American Medicine, "I stopped for a traffic light. As I reached to shift gears, I saw two hands and two gear shift levers. I was confused for a second, but was brought to my senses immediately by a brilliant play of colors in my right eye. The colors fluttered rapidly, and were not synchronous with the cardiac impulse [heart beat]. They involved the areas receiving the long (red) and the short (purple and violet) light waves. I then knew what had happened, and my only thought now was to get home before greater consequences followed. I reached home with no greater annoyance than that occasioned by the fluttering play of colors. "A test of self control faced me, for I must tell my wife the dire possibilities that faced me. We went over the situation tearfully, and my beloved wife assured me, come what may, she would stand by me, and as events proved, she was the greatest comforter God ever gave to man. We could now only wait for the reaction, which came in about 24 hours, and which was terrific.

"The first thing to appear was a dizziness, with diplopia [double vision]. The following day, I was unable to hold a cup in my right hand, and my mental processes were beginning to fail me. On the third day, I was a wreck. I saw everything double, and in trying to feed myself, I was always feeding the wrong face. . . . Mental processes were askew. . . . My surgical instruments that I had used for years seemed strange to me, and while I knew what they were, could not get it through my head how to use them. Writing was out of the question. ... In crossing a room, I would bump into most anything, and I had a desire to sleep much of the time.

"Then for two months I did not know who I was or where, or what it was all about. . . .

"I had to educate myself all over again. My brave little wife essayed to teach me, and she would press my finger down on the typewriter keys, and spell the word 'cat.' I could not mentally visualize what a cat was, though the name was familiar. I began to lose the confusing diplopia. ... As I saw other signs of improvement in my co-ordinate movements, I began to have hope. In about 16 months after the onset, mental confusion had almost disappeared as had dizziness; coordination of the arm and hand are about normal, although my writing is yet a little jerky.

"What reason have. I to think another similar experience is not just ahead of me, and the Grim Reaper at this moment standing ready to strike? Such uncertainty is maddening, and has rendered me unfit to do any work for which I was trained."

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