Word: lungfuls
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Cavities & a Grave. Dr. James L. Gilmore, a Pittsburgh obstetrician, had consulted Graham about what he believed to be a lung abscess. Graham jolted him with the news: it was cancer. Gilmore went home to Pittsburgh to decide whether he wanted an operation to remove the diseased part of his lung. In a few days he returned, ready for the operation, and told Surgeon Graham that while in Pittsburgh he had had some teeth filled. Said Graham with a laugh: "I like an optimistic patient." Replied Gilmore: "Yes, but I ought to tell you that I also bought a cemetery...
Surgeon Graham opened Gilmore's chest. What he saw brought him up sharp. The cancer was not, as he had expected, confined to one lobe of the left lung but had its origin in the bronchus (one of the two major branches of the windpipe) supplying air to the entire lung. Graham looked up to Chalfant. "I'm not going to be able to remove the cancer without removing the whole lung," he said through the muffling layers of his mask. "What do you think about...
...first time in history an entire lung was removed.* Dr. Graham was worried about how to fill the huge cavity remaining. He need not have been: Dr. Gilmore made a good recovery; his remaining lung expanded to fill the space...
Half a Pack a Day. Like other chest surgeons, Graham began to see more and more cases of lung cancer in the '30s, especially among men. His friend and fellow surgeon, Alton Ochsner of New Orleans (TIME, Jan. 2, 1956), who did not smoke, had his own answer: it was caused by smoking. Dr. Graham, who smoked half a pack a day, was at first unconvinced by his ebullient colleague. World War II halted further studies of this problem, but in 1947 a second-year medical student named Ernest L. Wynder went to Graham and suggested a statistical study...
...familiar result of the study: of 200 lung-cancer patients, 95.5% had smoked at least a pack a day for at least 20 years, and only one was a nonsmoker; among noncancer patients, only 50% smoked so much, and 11% were nonsmokers. The evidence was highly suggestive, but it fell short of proof that there was anything in cigarette smoke to cause cancer. Graham and Wynder (now of Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering Institute) went to work again. With tar from machine-smoked cigarettes they produced cancers on the backs of mice. In 1951 Dr. Graham quit smoking. That same...