Tonsil Blitz

Some 400 grinning natives greeted the three Washington specialists (a nose-&-throat man, an internist, a dentist). They had arrived in the Pribilof Islands, north of the Aleutians, for a quick checkup on the health of the seal hunters, who are wards of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. The doctors found the Aleuts in generally excellent health. But they were shocked when Aleut children opened their mouths. Their teeth were bad (the dentist promptly took samples of their drinking water for analysis). Their tonsils were worse.

Dr. William Arthur Morgan, head of the three-man mission, rolled up his sleeves and went to work. He had no facilities for making blood counts or fancy tests. But Dr. Morgan looked at the children's lava-toughened feet, figured that if their hearts could stand running up & down the islands' volcanic hills they could take an anesthetic. There was no sterilizing equipment, so Dr. Morgan operated barehanded, soaking his hands in alcohol between operations. The first day he performed 36 tonsillectomies, the next two days, 27 more apiece. The young patients, some only two years old, were wrapped in blankets and taken home in a truck. By the end of two weeks Dr. Morgan had extracted the tonsils of 104 Aleuts, one-quarter of the total population of the Pribilofs.

The returning doctors told Fish & Wildlife Service last week that on their way home they had stopped off at Seattle to arrange for shipment of 10,000,000 units of penicillin to guard the Aleuts against pneumonia next winter.

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