Medicine: Before & After

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The "Hiroshima Maidens" are 25 Japanese girls who were badly burned when the A-bomb fell on their city. Japanese plastic surgeons tried to restore their terribly defaced features, but scar tissue kept coming back. Partly under the sponsorship of Editor Norman Cousins of the Saturday Review, the girls were brought to New York's Mount Sinai Hospital last year for another try (TIME. Oct. 24, 1955). Their case was sometimes exploited politically in a horror campaign against U.S. use of atomic weapons, but the story quickly turned into one of medical triumph. Last week the first before-and-after pictures of the patients to be published showed the striking success of Mount Sinai's surgeons (see cuts). Back in Japan with the other girls, Shigeko Niimoto—whose deformities had been the worst—is studying to become a nurse's aide. Said she: "After watching the nurses at Mount Sinai, I decided that is the way I would spend my life—in service to others."