Medicine: Death: Wholesale

The hard fingers of Death clutched the bowels of infants and topers last week and carried them away wholesale.

Ten of the 40 babies in the maternity ward of Teaneck, N. J.'s Holy Name Hospital died of spasms and diarrhea.

Dr. Francis Christopher McCormack, Holy Name's medical director, summoned Bacteriologist William Hallock Park of New York City's Department of Health and Pathologist Leila Charlton Knox of St. Luke's Hospital to take the nine dead babies apart and search for the cause. Able Drs. Park and Knox could find no germ, no poison to account for the deaths.

Dr. McCormack thereupon did the inevitable drastic thing where maternity wards are concerned. He ordered all babies and mothers removed. He ordered all floors, ceilings, windows, doors and utensils scrubbed, disinfected and sterilized. He ordered all food supplies destroyed, all drinking water retested. Finally he ordered every doctor, nurse, orderly and other hospital employe examined, found no significant disease. All that Dr. McCormack and experts could do was to bemoan the mysterious mightiness of germs and viruses and poisons.

Meanwhile at Gloversville, at Utica and at other communities of New York's Mohawk Valley, topers swigged the best liquor they could afford. Louis Bondsman & wife eventually went to their Gloversville bed. Cramps woke Bondsman up. He could not rouse his wife to help him for she was dead. He got out of bed and into the cold street where a policeman found him shuffling along, weeping: ""I'll be dead. I'll be dead'. I'll be dead. . . ." He died in an ambulance.

In Utica, Mabel Rose, 42, while walking along the street in the early morning, after drinking cheap liquor, suddenly became dizzy and partially blind. In a hospital she died in agony. Victor Peterson, 43, liquor seller, interrupted police questioning to scream, "I have pains in my back." and to die forthwith.

When Death ceased fingering the Mohawk-Valley last week seven women, 25 men, all drinkers of rubbing alcohol and radiator anti-freeze compound, were done for.