In many ways world's first human heart transplant has the same meaning for South Africa that sputnik did for Russia. It is a moment of self-confidence and a chance to break out of self-imposed shells. While dedicating a new battery factory last week, the minister of mines and planning suddenly called on the crowd "to stand for a moment - just a brief moment - to pay tribute to the Cape Town team of doctors whose glittering achievement has reaped world fame for South Africa." The crowd rose and cheered and clapped and thumped. The incident reflected the intense national pride generated in South Africa since the University of Cape Town medical team completed the transplant at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town. The pride is even more intense than it might ordinarily be in another country because of the peculiar place of South Africa in the world and the feelings of its Afrikaner majority...

It was a scene of incredible tension. Scrub nurses, wearing flapper dresses of the 1920s, rushed in from a fancy dress party and slipped into their starched white uniforms. Surgeon Christian Barnard sat with only his underpants on and watched the scurrying of technicians and the wheeling of equipment. He burst into laughter, for no reason but release. It was time to begin the world's first operation transplanting the heart of one human being into the body of another. Dr. Barnard and the other surgeons on his team will soon put down the details of their medical experiment and publish it in a special edition of the South Africa Medical Journal. But, while waiting for the full technical details, the general and dramatic story of the operation can still be pieced together from the patient replies of the surgeons to press questions during this past hectic week after the operation...

Dr. Christian Barnard, the surgeon who removed the heart from a dead woman and put it in the body of a sick man, is firm in defending the ethics of the historic operation. "The purpose of this heart transplant," he told a news conference Thursday, "was not to do a heart transplant but to cure a sick man. The only way to do it was by the transplant. So I don't see any ethical question. I just tried to cure a sick man." Barnard, 45, a restless man who likes to joke with the press in both English and Afrikaans about the operation, suddenly turned quiet and measured in his comments when asked about criticism from a few surgeons in the United States. Reports reaching here have quoted Dr. Andre Cournard of Columbia University, a Nobel Prize winner, as saying, "Merely demonstrating that it is technically feasible to transplant a heart from one human to another is not in my opinion ethically a reason to proceed." Others have accused Barnard's University of Cape Town medical team of grandstanding for publicity. Barnard said he removed the heart from the body of 25-year-old Denise Ann Darvall only after she was dead by every legal definition of South African law. He said that meant all activity of the brain, lungs and heart had stopped...

Medicare will be “the most sweeping new departure in American Social legislation since Roosevelt’s Social Security Act thirty years ago.” That description, culled from one of the many news accounts of House passage of the bill, already has deadened into a cliché. All analysts have accepted the fact of medicare’s great impact, but very few have bothered to delve into the details of that impact. How will America and medicine change after medicare? Only a fool would try to predict this with certainty. A bill, especially one 296 pages long, has byways and tremors and lurking commas that can twist society in a manner no one anticipates. Yet some trends can be spotted ahead of time. Medicare has the potential to confirm doctors’ fears that federal pressures will change the way they practice medicine. It also has the potential to stuff a financial bonanza into the pockets of America’s fat-cat doctors...

A peculiar American disease has been isolated by medical scientists. The disease was first described in 1960 by Dr. J. V. Brown in the Western Journal of Surgery. An editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association then drew wide medical attention to it. Commercial houses are now marketing products designed to cope with it. Statistics on incidence and morbidity are scanty, and the name of the disease is hazy. Some doctors call it “the fast draw syndrome”; others, “the Dodge City syndrome.” But whatever the name, it is with us. It is most prevalent, of course, among the numerous special gun clubs that have sprouted across the land in recent years. Members, taking a leaf out of days of yore and some scripts of today, draw guns from their holsters, quick as lightning, and fire away. Unlike their legendary heroes, they don’t shoot at one another but aim at balloons. Sometimes, though, they miss the balloon and hit themselves in the right foot...

AN OLD FRIEND, encountering Representative Wilbur D. Mills in a Washington restaurant recently, reached out and squeezed the Arkansas congressman's arm. "Does it feel sore?" he asked. Mills showed a trace of a smile. "I haven't felt anything yet," he replied. Behind the jest was a serious issue: whether Lyndon B. Johnson, for all his Congressional arm-twisting, can persuade Mills to accept the principle of medical care for the aged financed through Social Security or a similar payroll-tax plan. This would represent a breakthrough for Medicare supporters, and might just be enough to send the program through Congress this year. There are many reasons why Medicare has never been approved, but the main obstacle has been Mills. As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, where all Social Security and tax bills must originate, Mills has blocked a bill from the House floor for seven years. Although Mills has repeatedly turned aside administration pleas, there have been recent reports, perhaps based more on hope than on substance, that his opposition to the Social Security approach of the King-Anderson Medicare bill is softening...

A noise you hardly notice may enter your mind sometimes and, in a strange transformed way, become part of your thoughts. An experiment exploring this phenomenon was completed for the U.S. Public Health Service recently by Dr. Fred Pine, a New York University psychologist His results could shed some light on subliminal advertising, the technique in which a slogan is flashed on a screen so quickly you do not realize you see it. When this technique first received public notice, it was assumed that if, for example, the slogan "See Your Dentist Twice a Year" were flashed, the unsuspecting audience would tend to do just that. But Dr. Pine's experiment indicates it is not that simple. The slogan or noise seems to enter your mind. But it does not come out in conscious thoughts just the way it entered. In fact, images may pop up so different from the slogan or noise that only a psychologist could tell they were related. This would not do an advertiser much good. In the case of the dentist slogan, flashing it would probably not send anyone off to have his teeth examined. But it might cause some one in the audience to dream later that his is a lion tamer staring at the gaping jaws of his animal...

“Ants, mommy, ants” whimpered three-year-old Sonny as he scampered from the front lawn into his home. Sonny's face was twisted into a strange white. His frantic mother searched his little body. On his left foot swelled three ant bites. Twenty-nine hours later, Sonny was dead. The boy had become the rare victim of an allergic reaction to the vicious bite and sting of an imported fire ant. There is a treatment for the reaction. But few doctors even know the Imported fire ant exists. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recognizes the ant as an economic pest, hurting crops, land and birds. Now two Tulane University scientists have recognized it as a medical pest irritating many people sometimes killing. Dr Rodney C. Jung, a specialist In tropical medicine and Dr. Vincent J. Derbes, an allergist, do not believe the imported fire ant makes a huge or unusual medical problem. But until doctors understand the problem they may give wrong, useless treatment...

Joel LeBlanc, a 34-year-old quiet, gray-haired intellectual, stared through his glasses at a doctor lighting a cigarette. “Why is he doing that?" Joel wondered. Suddenly he thought he knew. “He hates me. That’s why. He hates me.” Joel saw another doctor smile. “Why is he smiling? Because he hates me too. They all hate me. They want to hurt me.” Joel wanted to hurt them first. He saw a stool “I'll bash that smiler's head in,” Joel decided. He rushed to the stool. Then he stopped short. Have you guessed what was wrong with Joel? He was showing symptoms of schizophrenia — a dread mental disease. If Joel was a real schizophrenic, he probably would be taken to a mental hospital like 350,000 other victims in this country. His chances for full recovery would be slight. But Joel’s symptoms disappeared in less than two hours. He was not a schizophrenic. He was a subject in a dramatic experiment that may point to a cure of the illness that accounts for half of our mental patients and one-quarter of all those who lie in hospital beds...

Mary Smith, a new student nurse, dreamed of the day she would minister tenderly among clean, white beds. In her excited young mind, she could see herself bending over a coughing little boy, her gentle hand pushing back the dampened hair from his forehead. Three years later, in the crisp uniform of a registered nurse, she entered a big city hospital. Now she had her clean white beds and the coughing boy. But when the boy coughed, it was an aide who bent over him. Mary had to scribble on charts, mix medications, prepare hypodermic needles, supervise student nurses. She had no time for nursing in the old sense. What's more, a group of Tulane University researchers have concluded, that's the way Mary wants things to be, even though she may neither realize nor admit this fact...

[Stanley Meisler's first published article] It took 22 years, but I finally got up enough nerve to let a pretty nurse, Mary Jane Bishop of Cincinnati, draw one whole pint of dark RED blood from a bulging BLUE vein in my pale WHITE arm. Officials of the Red Cross and the American Legion trapped me yesterday during the first day of the bloodmobile's current visit to Middletown. I was snooping around the Legion Home on a routine check of Red Cross business when Mrs. Charles Fay, scheduling chairman, suggested a tour of the bloodmobile operation...