X-Ray for Heart Attack

In 1927 a young Austrian heart specialist named William Raab gave himself a stiff injection of adrenalin. In a few minutes he felt an agonizing stab in his shoulder, a choking sensation in his throat, lightning pains down his left arm, a drenching sweat. Dr. Raab's agony was really a triumph. For he had produced, for the first time, symptoms of the dread heart disease, angina pectoris.

Dr. Raab recovered from his experiment. The symptoms he had experienced gave him added evidence for a new theory of angina pectoris: that the bad actors in angina are the adrenal glands. The adrenals, which cap each kidney, are "second-wind" glands, spill forth energy-producing juices in time of stress. When certain sensitive individuals overwork, or get an emotional shock, their adrenals speed up to feverish pitch. The excess adrenalin tightens the arteries leading from lungs to heart, deprives the heart of oxygen just when it is most needed. Such temporary smothering. Dr. Raab believes, produces the stabbing spasms of angina.

It seemed to Dr. Raab that angina might be licked if the adrenals of angina patients could be prevented from flooding the body with adrenalin. After a decade of experiment he finally worked out the idea of weakening adrenal tissue by Xray.

Volunteers for treatment were 100 angina patients, of two weeks' to 23 years' standing. Dr. Raab focused the X-rays for a few seconds over each kidney, gave every patient three irradiations on each gland. After an interval of two to four months Dr. Raab gave some of them a second treatment, later even a third. He was careful not to irradiate the adrenals too much, for that might cause general weakness, low blood pressure, brown skin. The patients were allowed no other treatment except small quantities of nitroglycerin to lower blood pressure.

Some patients showed great improvement after one treatment, others after two or three. Dr. Raab believed that he was on the threshold of an important discovery. At that point (1938) Hitler swallowed Austria, and Dr. Raab left immediately, "by preference." He came to the U. S., where he had once been a Rockefellow, settled at the University of Vermont.

His former patients had scattered over Europe. He tried to find each one, wrote them letters, asking how long his treatments had benefited them. Last week, in the Annals of Internal Medicine, he reported their answers.

Of 60 patients who replied, 48 announced that they were hale & hearty. Some of their stories:

>Two old men, who had been bedridden for years, have walked and climbed stairs ever since they last saw Dr. Raab. Another, "who had not been able to do the easiest kind of work before treatment," applied for admission to a foreign country as a field laborer.

> "Patient Eight," who also fled her native land, wrote that "in spite of terrible excitement . . . the pressure near the heart. . . seemed to be blown away." Wrote "Patient 13": "I have sung 85 great operas in this season without the slightest effort."

> Four men "resumed their sport of mountain climbing." One, who had formerly taken 45 minutes to shuffle two-thirds of a level mile, now climbed to a height of 7,000 feet.

>Of 23 Jewish patients, only six had had a relapse after anti-Semitic laws were passed in Austria. During the severe reprisals which followed the murder of Diplomat Ernst vom Rath by a Jewish youth, not one of Dr. Raab's 16 Jewish patients still in Austria had had a heart attack.

To date, Dr. Raab has records of 100 cases abroad, twelve cases in the U. S. Total number improved: 86.

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