Medicine: Checkups

• Share

Insurance investigators were justifiably suspicious when Mrs. Grace Walker tried to collect for head injuries she claimed she suffered while walking near a granite quarry last month. Mrs. Walker, alias Rimrock Annie, had had a long and profitable history of similar claims. Her success was due to the fact that she could apparently concoct at will such convincing symptoms as bleeding at the ear. In Colorado, Annie admitted her talent for artistic malingering, pleaded guilty to a charge of fraud (TIME, Feb. 26). Last week she was sentenced to the state penitentiary for one to three years.

In Georgia, the parents of Carolyn Joan Purcell, just turned five, looked forward to celebrating a particularly happy Easter. Last January, doctors had offered them the choice for their child of blindness by surgery or almost certain death from suspected cancer of her eyes (TIME, Jan. 15). The Purcells stubbornly rejected both alternatives, took the child for further examination to Mayo Clinic. Last week, after sustained treatment with the hormone ACTH, Carolyn's Atlanta doctor announced that the noncancerous infection threatening her eyes had "very nearly disappeared."