Word: whaled
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...potheads, which pursue squid into Trinity Bay. It was a haphazard venture until Norwegian Captain Iversen settled near Dildo in 1946 and opened a factory to render blubber and process the greasy meat prized by mink ranchers for the gloss it gives to the animal fur. To increase the whale catch, he raised money for the Arctic Skipper and a sister ship, Arctic Venture, to go farther out into the bay and herd more potheads shoreward...
...suffer fell upon him. The vainglorious Charles Lee led a shameful retreat at Monmouth, and after being court-martialed, he slandered Washington up & down the states. Congress fretted and fumbled; its appropriations, snapped Quartermaster General Nathanael Greene, were "no more equal to our wants than a sprat in a whale's belly." The encampment at Morristown during the winter of 1779-80 was far worse, by Freeman's measure, than the winter at Valley Forge two years earlier...
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...
...strange experiment started in 1917, in Boston, when Dr. Paul Dudley White bought a preserved whale heart from an old sea captain. Like other heart specialists, Dr. White had learned to doubt some of his own diagnoses. Symptoms of disease in smaller human hearts, he suspected, might well be signs of health in larger, slow-beating organs. To test his theories, Dr. White began to study the hearts of mammals larger than man. As medical examiner for Boston's Franklin Park Zoo, he dissected the heart of a dead elephant. Later, he took electrocardiograms of docile circus elephants...