Medicine: A Man Without Worries

No contestant in the opening round of last week's Florida State Bridge Tournament was more cheerful than Frederick Bernard Snite Jr. True, he could not lift a hand to play his cards, because he was paralyzed, but he told the nurse who held them what he wanted to play. He saw the cards only by reflection in the mirror over his face. For 18 years and seven months, since he was stricken with polio, Fred Snite had been bound to an iron lung.

Bridgeplayer Snite, 44, did not show up for the tournament's second day. In the West Palm Beach hotel room where he had been taking a nap in the iron lung, he was found dead. The respirator was working, but after so many years of pumping against it, Fred Snite's heart had failed in his sleep. Thus ended perhaps the most famed fight an American has ever made to stay alive and to enjoy life against terrible odds.

Plugged Out & In. For years, the smiling face reflected in the iron lung's mirror was familiar to millions in newspapers and newsreels. His father spent an estimated $1,000,000 on the medical fight to keep him breathing. Fred graduated from Notre Dame in 1932, went to work in his wealthy father's business, the Local Loan Co. of Chicago. Four years later, in China on a trip around the world, he contracted bulbar poliomyelitis.

He had the incredible good fortune to land in Peking, where the Union Medical College had an iron lung—probably the only one in all Asia at the time. But thereafter, young Fred could never draw a carefree breath for fear that the machine that breathed for him might fail. And there was no hope of substantial recovery. His neck, back and arms were paralyzed; so were his chest and abdominal muscles. His left leg was 90% paralyzed; in his right he had a little movement.

The first 14 agonizing months in Peking cost $150.000, by his father's estimate. Then came a logistic problem as complex as it was costly ($50,000) to get Fred home, across 9,000 miles to River Forest, near Chicago. In his hospital room the iron lung was unplugged from the power supply and whisked to the ground floor. The lung was plugged in again to let Fred get his breath, then out again as he was rolled onto a waiting truck with a gasoline generator chugging. The off-on routine was repeated at the station, where a special train waited (with a generator in a baggage car), and at Shanghai, where attendants transferred Fred to a waiting iron lung aboard the President Coolidge.

Fellow Alumnus. Soon, Fred Snite's comings and goings in his private mobile hospital (a converted bus) and by private railroad car between Chicago and Florida became commonplace. Then, with his devout Roman Catholic family and an entourage of twelve (a doctor, five nurses, a physiotherapist, two orderlies, two mechanics and a chauffeur), he made the pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes. From the Vatican came the Pope's personal blessing. Fred Snite saluted the Pope "as an honorary fellow alumnus of the University of Notre Dame," insisted: "I ask no miracle ... I came here to receive the spiritual strength to keep on getting better."