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Three Threats. At the U.S. Public Health Service Indian Hospital and Sanatorium, Mary Grey-Eyes became the patient of Dr. Roger Des Prez, another Cornell University physician on special reservation duty. He found her almost comatose, kept up Burkhardt's precautionary measures, and started additional injections of isoniazid and streptomycin to attack the suspected tuberculous infection. White man's medicine was thus answering all three threats. But Mary Grey-Eyes kept getting worse. Her blood pressure fell, and her pulse raced. Dr. Des Prez decided to add yet another modern miracle drug, hydrocortisone. Within four hours Mary Grey-Eyes opened her big brown eyes, was clear-headed enough to know that she was in the hospital. Within 24 hours she was fully conscious, began a steady recovery from her meningitis (later confirmed as tuberculous by laboratory tests done in New York City). To guard against relapse, husband Robert took her clothes home from the sanatorium, hired a medicine man to conduct a 36-hour hózhóngji over them. This was far safer than the Indians' former habit of taking the patient home too soon, and probably just as effective.
Mary has done so well (though she will have to stay in the sanatorium for months until her infected spinal fluid is cleared completely) that recently, when her gall bladder kicked up again, her doctors decided to operate. Last week, in the Indian Hospital's small but modern operating room, Surgeon Henry C. Savage found one large gallstone and several smaller ones, dropped them into a beaker and gave them to delighted husband Robert Grey-Eyes, who had watched the operation from a balcony. They may figure in aiother hózhóngji soon. This week Mary Grey-Eyes was walking around, chatting with her husband and Navajo nurses, doing as well as though she had never been brushed by the wings of death.
Two-Way Help. The treatment of Mary Grey-Eyes was an unusually dramatic but otherwise typical activity of a precedent-breaking project, a cooperative effort of Cornell University, the Federal Government (through PHS), private foundations, and the Navajo people themselves. All give financial support to the Field Health Research Project. Just as Eastern financiers, philanthropists and Government functionaries meet in paneled board rooms and vote money to help "the poor Indian," so does the Navajo Tribal Council, governing body of a newly prosperous Navajo nation (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS) vote funds to help the white man. It has put up a total of $80,000 in the last seven years for the clinic's expansion and operating costs.
Set forlornly in the middle of a barren valley between spectacular mountains, the clinic at Many Farms is housed in a single-story, barracks-type building, while the 18 staff members (six white, twelve Navajos) live in trailers with various types of additions, and in old Santa Fe railroad boxcars. Under the direction of Manhattan-based Dr. Kurt W. Deuschle of Cornell's Department of Public Health, the project's aim is not only day-by-day treatment of ailing Navajos. Of greater long-range importance is a study in depth of the tribe's health needs (from a sample area of 800 sq. mi., with a population of 2,400), and how its traditional attitudes toward health can be most effectively merged with white men's methods.