Word: raab
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...young Austrian heart specialist named William Raab gave himself a stiff injection of adrenalin. In a few minutes he felt an agonizing stab in his shoulder, a choking sensation in his throat, lightning pains down his left arm, a drenching sweat. Dr. Raab's agony was really a triumph. For he had produced, for the first time, symptoms of the dread heart disease, angina pectoris...
...Raab recovered from his experiment. The symptoms he had experienced gave him added evidence for a new theory of angina pectoris: that the bad actors in angina are the adrenal glands. The adrenals, which cap each kidney, are "second-wind" glands, spill forth energy-producing juices in time of stress. When certain sensitive individuals overwork, or get an emotional shock, their adrenals speed up to feverish pitch. The excess adrenalin tightens the arteries leading from lungs to heart, deprives the heart of oxygen just when it is most needed. Such temporary smothering. Dr. Raab believes, produces the stabbing spasms...
...seemed to Dr. Raab that angina might be licked if the adrenals of angina patients could be prevented from flooding the body with adrenalin. After a decade of experiment he finally worked out the idea of weakening adrenal tissue by Xray...
Volunteers for treatment were 100 angina patients, of two weeks' to 23 years' standing. Dr. Raab focused the X-rays for a few seconds over each kidney, gave every patient three irradiations on each gland. After an interval of two to four months Dr. Raab gave some of them a second treatment, later even a third. He was careful not to irradiate the adrenals too much, for that might cause general weakness, low blood pressure, brown skin. The patients were allowed no other treatment except small quantities of nitroglycerin to lower blood pressure...
Some patients showed great improvement after one treatment, others after two or three. Dr. Raab believed that he was on the threshold of an important discovery. At that point (1938) Hitler swallowed Austria, and Dr. Raab left immediately, "by preference." He came to the U. S., where he had once been a Rockefellow, settled at the University of Vermont...