Word: porphyria
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Dates: during 1963-1963
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...dress with extra-long skirt and sleeves, pulled up her gloves, wrapped a kerchief about her face, and stepped nervously into a waiting car with tinted windows. All such precautions, Mrs. Carlson has learned from agonizing experience, are absolutely essential. She suffers from a form of the rare disease porphyria, and to venture into the daylight unprotected for so much as a few seconds causes painful skin eruptions...
...strange sickness is incurable and not fully understood. Through an inborn metabolic quirk, the body produces an excess of porphyrins, chemicals that are usually produced only in tiny amounts and seem somehow to be involved with the body's sensitivity to the sun. In some forms of porphyria, skin sensitivity is slight, but the victim suffers severe abdominal pains, bizarre mental disturbances, and sometimes respiratory paralysis. Mrs. Carlson suffers from a form called porphyria cutaneatarda, in which the porphyrin overproduction can be traced to an inherited liver malfunction. Doctors have studied such cases for years, but have only recently...
...knowledge is interesting; but to Mrs. Carlson, it means little that two Harvard Medical School researchers studied porphyria patients to find out whether a major change in the porphyrin content of their skin takes place before or after exposure to sunlight. Dr. J. W. Burnett and Dr. M. A. Pathak examined two victims and three healthy subjects, both after long confinement indoors and after exposure to the sun. In the people with porphyria, output of porphyrin compounds rose sharply after exposure to the light; the others showed no change. Sunlight, the doctors concluded, increases the concentration of porphyrin...
...height of her fame ("I've been a clothes horse for fi-i-i-ve years-how do I know I'm not an idi-i-i-ot?") to try her hand at Hollywood scriptwriting and finally became the happy wife of an advertising executive; of porphyria; in Manhattan...