Word: breath
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...illness that is gradually choking to death a million or more Americans might be expected to be a well-known subject of intensive attack by medical scientists. But the progressive and eventually fatal shortness of breath that doctors call emphysema (pronounced em-fe-see-muh) is so little known that it has no common English name. Until recently few laymen even realized that it existed,* and most doctors thought it was rare. But emphysema is rapidly changing its status. It is now recognized as probably the most common disabling disorder of the respiratory system...
...only do many of the individual alveoli lose their elasticity, so that they do not exchange enough carbon dioxide and oxygen, but much of the lung wall itself loses its stretch. The lungs tend to remain inflated. What the patient is aware of, said Dr. Ebert, is shortness of breath-especially when he begins to exert himself. The condition gets progressively worse until the victim finds himself winded after less and less exertion. Ultimately he is out of breath even when sitting still...
...normal effects of aging. Even in healthy men, the lungs lose some of their stretch with advancing age. Emphysematous damage to some part of the lungs has now been found to occur in a majority of men over 60, whether or not they ever complained of shortness of breath. It is more common among men than women, more common among smokers than nonsmokers, and particularly evident where there is severe air pollution...
Drugs & Detergents. What the physician can do for shortness of breath depends largely on its cause. Many cases of bronchitis are the result of infection, and can be largely relieved, if not actually cured, by treatment with antibacterial drugs. Other cases are relieved by inhaling substances that help to break up the mucous secretions. But emphysema is stubborn. Since its basic causes are still unknown, doctors have as yet no hope of finding a true cure or general preventive. Yet treating its effects is important because emphysema neglected overtaxes the heart in a manner that may cause death...
...Shawn and Joan Hackett are admirable foils. He paints the clown-husband character with broad vaudevillian brush strokes. She is a comic pointilliste, and her precise inflections of wifeliness dot the brain like a quiver of hatpins. Peterpat sometimes gets enveloped in the vapors of farce, but one deep breath of comic wisdom animates it-marriage is as funny as hell...