Medicine: Plucky Boy

At Cleveland last week, William Capps, a 19-year-old Negro from Somerset, Ky., hopped a freight train bound for Toledo, where he hoped to find work. Hanging on a ladder between box cars, he nodded. Suddenly he felt himself falling, grabbed wildly, caught a lower rung of the ladder. As he did so his left foot touched a spinning train wheel. The foot was pulled in and crushed between wheel top and car bottom.

In agony, William Capps hung on for about a quarter of a mile. Then he dropped from the train and crawled into a weed clump. His foot was a pulp and he was afraid of gangrene. Gritting his teeth, he pulled out his penknife, carefully cut off his foot, twisted his sweater around the stump to stop the bleeding.

Next he made a pair of crutches from limbs of a nearby tree. In spite of pain and weakness he began hobbling along the tracks. What happened in the hours that followed no one knows. At the end of seven hours, a mile from the patch of weeds where he had left his amputated foot, he fell fainting before an astonished train crew.

When he awoke at St. Joseph's Hospital, in Lorain, Ohio, William Capps begged for chicken and watermelon. "I might die," he urged. Doctors put him to sleep again and amputated the rest of his leg to a point five inches below the knee.

"William is one plucky boy," said Dr. William E. Wheatley. "He did a fair job of amputation, although, of course, he risked serious danger of infection from his knife. He'll pull through all right."