Hardening Arteries

If, as doctors like to say, a man is as old as his arteries, King George VI was older than his years. Never robust, he spent uncounted hours standing stiffly at public ceremonies or walking before endless review lines. The strain of these activities was bad for a man with circulatory trouble. Because of his medical history, the King's death from a coronary thrombosis (a blood clot blocking the artery on which the heart's muscle depends) was no surprise to medical men.

The world first heard of the King's artery trouble in 1948, when he gave up public appearances because of pain in his right leg and foot. This was caused by a narrowing of the arteries: not enough blood was getting through, the foot was often extremely cold, and there was danger of gangrene. The King's doctors decided that their patient was a victim of thromboangiitis obliterans, also called Buerger's disease.* They found, too, that all the King's arteries were hardening beyond his years.

Cutting the Nerve. There was little they could do for the arteriosclerosis, but for the trouble in the right leg there was a palliative: cutting some of the sympathetic nerves (near the spine) which control the contraction of leg arteries. The nerve operation was helpful, and the King started to get around again as well as ever.

Then last summer, a canny Scottish doctor sent the King home from his holidays to be bronchoscoped, and a growth was found in one lung. On operation (TIME, Oct. 8) it proved to be a fast-spreading type of cancer. Despite the strain on the heart of such drastic surgery as removal of a lung, the King seemed to have made a good recovery.

Sober Choice. But the King and his doctors faced a sober question which only George VI himself could answer. Should he try to prolong his life to the utmost by taking scrupulous care never to tax his heart, and become a perpetual invalid? Or should he live, as much as possible, the life of a normal man of 56? In the background, too, there was the inevitable question of a reappearance of cancer.

King George chose to live as normally as possible. On the last day of his life he was out shooting hares. Although the King used special shells to reduce recoil, his weakened frame still had to take the repeated kick of a shotgun. There is no reason to believe that this hastened his death. During the night, as might have happened any other night in recent years, the blood slowed down in one of the King's hardened (and narrowed) coronary arteries. As it slowed, it thickened. Finally, it formed a large clot, and the King's life was at an end. There was not enough pain to wake him.

* After Leo Buerger, a Vienna-born surgeon, who practiced in Manhattan and who described the disease in 1908.

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