The Baby & the Rules

The water was boiling in the croup kettle that Irene Lingo was fixing for her five-month-old daughter, Laura Jean, when the baby kicked it over. The scalding liquid burned Laura Jean's back and one arm. Mrs. Lingo wiped her off with a towel, ran two blocks to summon her brother-in-law with his car, and in a few minutes presented the baby at the emergency room of small (112 beds) Woodlawn Hospital on Chicago's South Side.

There, Dr. Hans Jaeger (an experienced German physician not yet licensed to practice in Illinois) examined Laura Jean. He saw no sign of shock and told a nurse how to dress the burns. Then he asked Mrs. Lingo whether she had hospitalization insurance. She did not. Could she put up $100 deposit? She could not. Then, said the doctor, the baby would have to go to Cook County Hospital. 10 1/2 miles away. He was sure that she would be all right in a car, and he gave Mrs. Lingo a note to arrange for the admission.

It took well over an hour to get to County Hospital, but Laura Jean seemed no worse and was promptly admitted. Two interns and a resident pediatrician saw no evidence of shock; they changed the dressing on her burns and put her to bed. Late at night she awoke and played. But in the morning she was dead.

Last week the case of Laura Jean Lingo got a full official airing. Had she received adequate emergency treatment at Woodlawn? Medical witnesses agreed that she had. Had her life been endangered by Woodlawn's refusal to admit her? Doctors thought not. What had she died of? Dr. Jerry Kearns, coroner's physician, said he was sure she had died of the burns, but in fact nobody knew, because Coroner Walter McCarron (no physician but a politician) decided not to order an autopsy.

The coroner's jury brought in a verdict that death was accidental and that officials at Woodlawn Hospital had been grossly (but not criminally) negligent, because an unregistered physician treated Laura Jean and the police were not notified. Seated beside her husband John, a factory worker, Mrs. Lingo cried: "She was my only baby . . . I'll never forget this."

If Chicago's rough & tough Health Commissioner Herman Bundesen has his way, the city's 70 hospitals will not soon forget it, either. He ordered inspections to make sure that all were complying with the rules. To Chicagoans generally, the case highlighted a painfully familiar problem: the red tape that a patient must fight through to get into a hospital bed. Said one Chicago woman: "You rush to the hospital to have your baby and they keep you standing at the desk while they ask you your life's history. After all that, they inquire, 'Are you in labor?' "

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