Medicine: Stricken from the Record

When Toronto’s Dr. Gordon Murray announced that he had operated on seven paralyzed patients by cutting, shortening and rejoining their spinal cords, neurosurgeons were incredulous. How could he have succeeded where so many others, equally skilled, had failed? Last week Toronto General Hospital issued a dismal and dismaying report on Dr. Murray’s cases. A search of its records disclosed that in only one case had the spinal cord actually been cut, as Dr. Murray described. And this was not the case of Bertrand Proulx, whom Murray had exhibited at a fund-raising dinner (TIME, Nov. 24). In fact, the hospital did not even know what had happened to this unidentified patient since he returned to the U.S. As for Proulx and five others, said the hospital spokesman, they had had routine surgery for decompression of the spinal cord, followed by physiotherapy, with moderate benefit, as is usually seen in such cases.