HOSPITAL TRAGEDY.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXV, Issue 1147, 18 September 1913, Page 4

HOSPITAL TRAGEDY.

PATIENT’S FIGHT FOR LIFE.

Eeighbourn Middleton, a wellknown New Yorker, died recently in the hospital (says a New York message of July 31st), after a gallant fight for life, which has attracted attention throughout the country. The young man was suffering from a peculiar form of anaemia, resulting irom an attack of typhoid fever contracted on his honeymoon. He was admitted to the hospital on July xßth, and the physicians declared that quick transfusion of blood was his only chance of life. His father twice went on the operating table beside bis son, and endured the loss of some of his own blood, that it might be transfused into the veins of bis boy. The patient rallied a little, but again began to sink, and the young bride next offered her blood. Gordon Middleton, a seventeen-year-old cousin of the patient, next made the sacrifice, and was followed by Frederick Townes, a college mate and lifelong friend of Middleton. His mother .offered to give her life for her boy, but the physicians refused to allow her to make the sacrifice. Middleton’s brother Malcolm was twenty miles from civilisation, in the Arizona Desert, when a telegram informing him of his brother’s desperate condition reached him. That night he walked twenty miles over the desert, caught a stage in the morning to the railway station, and travelled night and day reaching New York on Monday. As soon as he had rested from the long trip he laydown beside his brother and his veins were tapped. The physicians knew by this time that the case was hopeless, but the brother insisted. The patient was unconscious, but he rallied after this transfusion and became conscious. He spoke to all the family at the bedside, and thanked them for what they had done for him. Then he slipped back into coma and sank steadily until he died.