Word: whaled
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...rough seas running off Clark's Point, Alaska, a small skiff put out. It carried a heart specialist and his assistants, but they were not on an errand of mercy. Curiosity-the kind of curiosity that kills cats for science-led them on. They were looking for a whale; they wanted to feel its pulse...
They found what they were looking for in the shallows of Nushagak Bay-a small (one-ton) beluga whale, come in to feed on salmon. It was not the first whale which had shied away from their "stethoscope": in earlier efforts the hunters had been unsuccessful. This time a husky cannery worker got a good grip on the patient : he drove home a pair of brass-headed harpoons wired to a portable electrocardiograph...
...whale was wildly uncooperative. It thrashed about the bay for an hour while the doctor clung to the gunwale. Amidships, a cardiograph expert crouched over his instrument and worked desperately with the controls. Somehow he managed to get a two-minute record of the plunging whale's heartbeats. The spray-drenched scientists went happily away, clutching the first such record in medical history...
...fever disappeared after the first day. He ate well, slept well, kept trying to whale away at his work, and actually managed to act on 233 bills during his three days in the hospital. But this took some doing. A chest man examined him. An abdomen man examined him. An eye man examined him. So did a heart man. Before he was through, eight different specialists had thumped, pummeled, probed, peered and questioned...
...appearance in Abilene . . . dedicating the Eisenhower Memorial Foundation . . . This speech hit me so hard that I tried all afternoon to get a transcript of it ... Some of America's best-known newspapermen didn't even bother to cover the event . . . I think they missed out on a whale of a human document...