Medicine: Boston Pioneers

One Sunday in 1826, a penniless youth of 19 from Bakersfield, Vt. appeared at Boston's fashionable Old South Church. The ushers looked askance at his homespun clothes and refused to find him a seat. Last week Boston felt differently about the Green Mountain boy": the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, named in his honor and originally endowed from his estate, put on a high-toned medical symposium to mark the 150th anniversary of its benefactor's birth. The facts that Brigham once peddled oysters from a wheelbarrow and was arrested for selling liquor illegally were little noted. He was praised for having made a fortune in the restaurant business and in real estate, but most of all for having specified in his $1,300,000 will that after 25 years the residue of his estate should be used to found a hospital "to be called the Brigham Hospital for the care of sick persons in indigent circumstances." (Both his career and his philanthropic example were closely followed by a nephew, so Boston also has the Robert B. Brigham Hospital, for incurable diseases.)

Philanthropist Peter Bent Brigham died in 1877; it took longer than he had foreseen to get the hospital started in the Roxbury section, but in 1913 it opened its doors to Boston's indigents and thanks to a tie-in with Harvard Medical School, immediately began to make medical history.

Brain & Heart. The hospital's first surgeon in chief was the late great Harvey Gushing, who immediately began to develop the improvements in technique which made brain surgery a lifesaving, everyday procedure. Working side by side with Gushing was a radiologist. Dr. Merrill Sosman, who pioneered X-ray treatment for pituitary tumors. In 1920 Surgeon Elliott Cutler made a daring attempt at surgery inside the heart, to correct a narrowed mitral valve; it was crude and premature (all but one patient died), but it helped pave the way for one of his pupils, Dwight Emary Harken. In 1948 Dr. Harken was one of three surgeons who, independently and almost simultaneously, began to operate with increasing success and decreasing risk to widen mitral valves scarred and narrowed by rheumatic fever.

In 1934 Drs. George Minot, William Murphy and George Whipple won the Nobel Prize for their discovery, proved on Brigham patients, that liver extract is effective against pernicious anemia. Other notable Brigham pioneering involved historic work with the artificial kidney, transplanting kidneys between identical twins, and removing both adrenal glands from certain cancer patients.

Spare Organ? Today vigorous research at the Brigham is continually pushing back medical frontiers, in many cases along the lines sketched out by the great men of its early days. Endocrinologist George W. Thorn and colleagues are still exploring the adrenals, gradually outlining the role of a recently discovered and potent but little-understood hormone, aldosterone. Dr. Harken is working with famed Scientist Vannevar Bush on plastic valves which may actually replace the aortic valve in patients with some kinds of heart damage.