ARGENTINA: Good Doctor, Bad Case

At the Buenos Aires airport, Dr. Castroviejo stepped out of the plane into an acute embarrassment, Dr. Ramon Cas-troviejo, a native of Castile, Spain, and now a citizen of the U.S., is a crack eye surgeon from Manhattan's Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center; Argentina's President Roberto Marcelino Ortiz is almost blind. The doctor's embarrassment was caused by the crowd at the airfield, who put two & two together.

A woman plumped a stifling bouquet of autumn flowers into his arms: cheers burst from 300 waiting supporters of President Ortiz. The good doctor disingenuously protested that he had come merely to visit his porteño relatives: to wit, five uncles, 23 cousins. The crowd knew better.

Since September 1940 sick, shelved President Ortiz had sat in his darkened mansion on the Calle Suipacha like a weakening but stubbornly weaving spider. He can make little; but he can prevent much. A 16-insulin-unit-per-day diabetic, with one eye permanently blind, the other four-fifths blacked out by diabetic cataract, he cannot control, but will not let go of, Argentine politics. The much he can prevent is a unanimous Government-bloc support to Acting President Ramon S. Castillo's policy of refusing belligerent collaboration with the Allies. Between President Ortiz and ex-President Agustin P. Justo, Argentine pro-war groups flutter uncertainly in search of leadership.

Medically, the case is practically hopeless. Ortiz' diabetes, according to the doctors who reported to the Senate's investigating committee, is of the mellitus type, productive of small hemorrhages destructive of the eye's retina, though he is "able to perceive objects with the aid of strong sunlight and positive periscopic lenses." Dr. Castroviejo is, on the other hand, famed as the author of over 400 operations involving the grafting of a normal piece of cornea in a diseased eye. Reduced to one-syllable words, the doc is good but the case is bad. Chance of recovery is, in the full sense of the word, negligible.

Dr. Castroviejo at week's end examined Ortiz' eye, but remained prudently mum. Those sectors of the Argentine press which are desperately anxious to drag Argentina into the war hailed the doctor as a "mir-acle man." Finally the honest surgeon cried: "I'd like to get a change of scene, hide out in a nightclub somewhere, but even that's impossible here."

If Dr. Castroviejo can resuscitate Ortiz as a political force, he will indeed have proved himself the genuine miracle man the pro-war press terms him. His miracle will have been twofold: to save a vision generally considered lost to diabetes, to rescue a national policy in danger of being lost to stubborn neutrality.