Word: althausen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last week the University of California's Dr. Theodore Leonidowitch Althausen suggested an answer: the human body can readjust itself, and learn to function almost normally, with anything more than two feet of jejunum plus the duodenum. Estonian-born Dr. Althausen had previously described a case in which a woman was left with only 18 inches of vital gut she died of malnutrition after three years. Now in Gastroenterology, Dr. Althausen and three colleagues described two cases in which, with but little more small intestine the patients were living normally...
Because such cases are far from common, Dr. Althausen counted himself lucky when, on a visit to Australia last year, he ran across a third and most unusual case A wiry, freckled, 50-year-old seaman named Bergman had been left with only two feet of jejunum and duodenum. He worked on a soot-grimed freighter pitching and rolling across Bass Strait between Melbourne and Tasmania. Althausen and Melbourne's Dr. Ronald Doig made one interesting discovery in studying the sailor: it made no difference to his two feet of small intestine whether he got predigested or ordinary food...
...type with a weather eye for pretty nurses, Bergman had made a quick comeback from the operation; in ten weeks he was back aboard the freighter on light duty. Three months later Dr. Doig let him go back to normal hours and duties. "He must be all right," says Althausen, "or he couldn't eat that ship's food. If you can stand that, you can stand anything...