Heart, Circulation and Blood 



1^' 1955) when President Eisenhower had a heart attack, Doctor Paul 

 Dudley White of Boston was immediately summoned to the President's 

 bedside. No wonder, for there are few men who know as much about 

 hearts as Dr White. Not content with probing the secrets of our own, he 

 took his complicated instruments to the giants of the animal kingdom as 

 well : first to elephants and then, finding their hearts a little on the small 

 side, to whales and dolphins. 



He began with Belugas, mere 14-footers found in the Arctic, schools of 

 which visit bays and estuaries where they are caught fairly easily. White 

 started operating from Clarks Point (Bristol Bay, Alaska) where he could 

 count on the help of experienced gunners. Now gunners do not normally 

 take a whale's pulse, but in this case they helped to do so. The electro- 

 cardiograph, an instrument for recording small electric changes during 

 contraction of the muscles of the heart, has two electrodes which are 

 attached to the subject's body. Attaching such plates to a living whale is 

 no easy matter, and that is where the gunners came in - they used 

 harpoons as electrodes. At first it was thought that one harpoon would 

 do the trick, and that the current would return through the water to a 

 special copper plate attached to the boat. However, it soon appeared that 

 this method was inadequate and that two electrode harpoons were needed. 



Luckily, White had been given a grant to cover most of the expenses, 

 and, for the rest, he drew liberally on his private income. Flying a small 

 aeroplane, he spotted a school of Belugas on 6th August, 1952, and sent 

 out a motorboat with the necessary instruments in pursuit of the animals. 

 After a number of unsucccessful attempts, lie finally managed to get an 

 adult Beluga to trail the wires for half an hour and thus obtained a number 

 of electrocardiograms. Encouraged by his success, White felt he could 

 now tackle the slow-swimming Californian Grey Whale also, but despite 

 assistance from the U.S. Navy and biologists from the Scripps Ocean 

 Institute (University of California) his attempts proved abortive. The 



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