Medicine: Shocking the Heart

By all appearances, the patient was dead on arrival, evidently from a heart attack. William Fruehling, 49, of St. Croix Falls, Wis. (pop. 1,500), a village handyman, had been helping to take a snow plow off a truck in zero weather just after lunch when he collapsed, half in and half out of the cab of his truck. A fellow worker had found him, wrestled the 200-lb. null onto the seat of the truck and drove it a quarter-mile to St. Croix Memorial Valley Hospital.

In the emergency room, Dr. Joseph Belshe made...