GUATEMALA: Graft Expert

Guatemalan doctors liked Salvatore Lanza at first. A slender, high-strung Italian in his middle 30s, he was loaded with Old World charm. From his voluble talk, it appeared that he was a devoted scientist and surgeon, educated at European universities. About his specialty, plastic surgery, he seemed to know all there was to know. Since plastic surgery is a virgin field in Guatemala, several doctors gratefully accepted his services as a consultant.

Lanza made friends outside medical circles, too. Within a few months after his arrival in Guatemala in mid-1950, he and his personable Italian wife had struck up a warm friendship with Defense Minister

Rafael O'Meany. Presently O'Meany appointed Lanza to the staff of the Military Hospital, and provided him with a furnished house and a car.

Bones & Boasts. At the hospital, Lanza avoided run-of-the-ward tasks. He devoted his energies and talents to persuading his superiors that what Guatemala needed was a bone bank for surgical grafts. As a result, a delegation of Mexican officers and doctors journeyed to Guatemala last October to attend the inauguration of the country's first bone bank—six small glass jars of frozen bone fragments.

Hailed as a great man and a boon to the nation, Lanza drank deep of fame—and promptly became intoxicated. He announced that he was preparing to graft new limbs on infantile-paralysis victims. Soon, he declared, he would show preliminary examples of similar radical grafts, including a goat with donkey's legs, a sheep with dog's legs, a chicken with a pigeon's head, a dove with rabbit's ears and a rabbit with dove's wings. No gonkey, shog, or picken turned up, but Lanza did give newsmen a brief, none-too-close look at what appeared to be a winged rabbit (see cut). He later announced that the rabbird was doing fine and would "soon feel the urge to fly."

Slings & Arrows. Aghast at these antics, the doctors began to probe into Lanza's past. They found that during his two years as a "surgeon"' in the New World (he spent eight months in Venezuela and Colombia before going to Guatemala), he had never produced a single document to show that he had attended any medical school. Instead of the "200 successful operations" he claimed to have performed in Guatemala, he had actually done only eleven, not all successful. But he had gathered in far more than eleven fees, by collecting from prospective patients in advance.

By last week, Lanza himself was feeling the urge to fly. The military authorities, reluctantly bowing before the winds of medical indignation, had booted him out of his hospital post. An ex-patient sued him, newspapers denounced him as a charlatan, and the Colegio Médico sent out bulletins warning other Latin American medical societies against him. Sadly, Lanza prepared to depart for Mexico.