Medicine: Hearts & Scalpels

When Dr. Horace Smithy, crack young (34) surgeon of the Medical College of South Carolina, first examined his patient, he thought her trip to Charleston had been in vain. Blonde Betty Lee Woolridge was an almost classic example of the wreckage caused when a heart is crippled by rheumatic fever. At 21, Betty Lee weighed only 85 pounds; veins in her neck stood out like whipcords; her abdomen was swollen with a fluid by-product of congestive heart failure. Doctors in her home town of Canton, Ohio had told her she had only a year...

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