Amputation on a Girder

Hospital internes on emergency call sometimes have queer cases to.handle in a hurry. Last week in Manhattan, Interne David Wassermann of City Hospital had the queerest one in his four-month career. He found his patient, a small, plucky handyman named Marion Garey, wrapped in elevator cables over the elevator shaft of a 16-story hotel. The cables held the man so tightly that he could move only his left arm. And with this he was dully smoking a cigaret when Dr. Wassermann arrived.

The doctor saw that the man was almost dead from a complete fracture of the left lower leg and from loss of blood through many lacerations. To get to his patient, 5-ft. 11-in., 200-lb. Dr. Wassermann had to walk along a steel girder, eight inches wide, atop the 16-story shaft. On that dizzying perch he had to amputate the leg, disentangle the man from the cables.

The morphine which Dr. Wassermann injected into helpless Marion Garey was less to deaden pain, which the man no longer felt, than to prevent him from collapsing from shock. After giving the morphine, the doctor applied a tourniquet, cut through the flesh of the broken leg, applying hemostats to the blood vessels he severed. He had no need to saw the bones; they were broken through. Twelve minutes after the morphine injection, Dr.

Wassermann, having bandaged the leg stump, handed the man to observers on the roof of the hotel, inched off the narrow girder, took his patient to City Hospital. There a surgeon re-amputated Marion Carey's left stump above the knee so that he may wear an artificial leg with comfort.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.