Medicine: Rugged Boy

In Boston, a six-year-old boy tumbled off a porch into a rosebush, was rushed to a hospital. There Surgeon Richard H. Miller probed a hole in the boy’s jaw, found the broken end of a rose cane, began to pull it. Out came a rush of blood. The surgeon quickly shoved the stick back. Then he cut open the boy’s neck down to the collarbone, found that the cane had gone through the jugular vein.

Surgeon Miller recalled the 1914 ramming of the Empress of Ireland in the St. Lawrence River by a Danish collier, whose panicked captain rashly backed away, left the liner with a gaping hole. The Empress sank with 1,024 passengers. Congratulating himself on not having repeated the captain’s mistake, Dr. Miller tied off the vein, hauled the carotid artery out of the way and pulled out the stick, which ran from the boy’s jaw down through his neck and chest to the fourth rib.

Reported Surgeon Miller in the New England Journal of Medicine last week, “the rugged boy” recovered.