[Nfbf-l] FW: [fcb-l] FW: [leadership] Very Interesting Obit in Today's Washington Post

Fri May 29 14:36:28 UTC 2009

Thanks, Judy, for sharing this.  Great article!
Sherrill

-----Original Message-----
From: nfbf-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nfbf-l-bounces at nfbnet.org]On
Behalf Of Judith Hamilton
Sent: Friday, May 29, 2009 10:18 AM
To: NFBF LISTSERVE
Subject: [Nfbf-l] FW: [fcb-l] FW: [leadership] Very Interesting Obit in
Today's Washington Post

Passing this along to those  who might be  interested.
Judy
Gainesville Chapter

FW: [fcb-l] FW: [leadership] Very Interesting Obit in Today's Washington
Post
Date: 5/29/2009 9:19:14 AM
Subject: [fcb-l] FW: [leadership] Very Interesting Obit in Today's
Washington Post
>
This obituary is fascinating to me because this is the eye condition
 that I have.  I was born in 1945 and may be one of the oldest premature
 infants with RLF.  I do not normally send out messages like this one but
 it is a tiny piece of my history that I thought others might like to
> see.
>
> Paul
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: John McCann [mailto:lists at jamsite.us]
> Sent: Thursday, May 28, 2009 9:47 PM
> To: leadership at acb.org
> Subject: [leadership] Very Interesting Obit in Today's Washington Post
>
> Hello Fellow ACB Leaders:
>
> To all congenitally blind folks of a certain age, the obit below may be
> of
> particular interest.
>
> John
>
> __________
>
> Doctor Helped Link Extra Oxygen, Blindness in Newborns.
> David Brown.
>
> Leroy Hoeck, 97, a Washington pediatrician who helped solve one of the
> great
> medical mysteries of the postwar era, died May 25 at a retirement home
> in
> Salisbury, Md. He had arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Dr. Hoeck
> (pronounced Hake) was a staff member at the District's public hospital
> when
> he teamed up with a physician still in training to figure out why an
> unusual
> number of premature infants were becoming blind after prolonged stays in
> the
> newborn nursery. Their hunch that supplemental oxygen might be the cause
> turned out to be correct. But first they had to prove it. They did so in
> a
> randomized controlled trial, the first in ophthalmology, that ran from
> 1951
> to 1953 at Gallinger Municipal Hospital, the huge institution in
> Southeast
> Washington that was later renamed D.C. General. That a pair of unknown
> researchers could show that a substance as beneficial as oxygen could
> cause
> a condition as devastating as blindness was so surprising that the
> pediatric
> medical establishment repeated the experiment on a huge scale to confirm
> the
> findings. Nevertheless, the initial clinical trial at Gallinger was
> crucial
> to showing the importance of testing medical therapies -- even those as
> seemingly beneficial as extra oxygen -- with randomized trials. Doctors
> have
> to approach their patients, and what they think they know, with a
> certain
> amount of humility," said Steven Goodman, a physician at Johns Hopkins
> University's Bloomberg School of Public Health and an expert on the
> history
> of medical research. This is one of the trials that taught us humility.
> Dr.
> Hoeck's partner in the study, Arnall Patz, went on to become chairman of
> ophthalmology at Johns Hopkins Hospital and winner of the prestigious
> Lasker
> Award for his research on retrolental fibroplasia, as the oxygen-caused
> eye
> damage was then called. Dr. Hoeck, in contrast, became a private
> practitioner after he left Gallinger in 1954. He had an office in his
> home
> in the Prince George's County community of Hillcrest Heights until the
> 1980s. He then joined two other pediatricians at an office in Clinton.
> He
> retired in 1990. His role in the pivotal oxygen trial is largely
> forgotten,
> although Patz has credited him with having the initial suspicion that
> oxygen
> was the culprit in the mysterious blindings. He played a huge role in
> finding the cause of the premature-baby blindness," his one-time
> collaborator, 88, said yesterday. Patz received the Presidential Medal
> of
> Freedom in 2004, largely for his work on the condition, which is now
> known
> as retinopathy of prematurity. I do think he felt overshadowed," Dr.
> Hoeck's
> daughter, Barbara Hoeck Miller, a retired radiologist, said yesterday.
> But
> he was not the sort of person who was going to go after the recognition.
> There was something that needed to be learned, and he wanted to learn
> it.
> Leroy Edward Hoeck was born Nov. 2, 1911, in Sibley, Iowa. His mother
> had
> gone there as a child from Illinois in a covered wagon. His father ran a
> grocery. As a high school junior, Dr. Hoeck later recalled, he took a
> trip
> with a friend to Mount Rushmore, which at the time consisted of George
> Washington and half of Thomas Jefferson. He graduated from the
> University of
> Iowa and its medical school, did an internship at a hospital in
> Indianapolis, and worked as a general practitioner in Indiana until he
> was
> drafted into the Army Medical Corps, for which he worked in hospitals in
> California, Alaska and England. In 1947, he married the former Dorothy
> Cosner. She died in 2006. Besides his daughter, of Rockville, survivors
> include a son, Edward Hoeck of Salisbury; a sister; and four
> grandchildren.
> He and his wife had a third child, Carolyn Sue, who died shortly after
> birth. After the war, Dr. Hoeck trained as a pediatrician at Gallinger,
> which at the time was the largest public hospital between New York's
> Bellevue and New Orleans's Charity. Around that time, he was the doctor
> for
> the first baby born weighing less than 1,000 grams at Gallinger to
> survive
> and be discharged. When Dr. Hoeck saw the boy several months later, it
> was
> clear the infant was blind. Recalling the moment 50 years later still
> caused
> him to choke with emotion. That was devastating. I just felt we had to
> find
> the cause," he said in an interview for a story published in The
> Washington
> Post in 2005. Dr. Hoeck's research led him to an obscure 1940 article on
> the
> effects of supplementary oxygen given to pilots at simulated high
> altitude.
> It showed that when someone breathed nearly pure oxygen, the blood
> vessels
> in the back of the eye constricted severely. Patz and other researchers
> later showed that this response was especially dramatic in preemies and
> could lead to the destruction of the retina. Dr. Hoeck mentioned the
> discovery to Patz, an ophthalmology resident at Gallinger also
> interested in
> the problem. Patz proposed that they do a trial in which some premature
> babies got constant oxygen -- which was the customary practice -- and
> others
> got it only if they were in respiratory distress or turning blue. In the
> first group, 12 of 60 babies became blind. In the second, 1 of 60 did.
> The
> publication of the study caused such consternation that pediatricians at
> 18
> universities cooperated to run the experiment again. They confirmed Dr.
> Hoeck and Patz's findings, and the practice of routinely giving
> concentrated
> oxygen to preemies quickly stopped. By that time, however, nearly 10,000
> infants (including the singer Stevie Wonder) had been blinded by the
> practice, although in many cases the oxygen might also have saved their
> lives.
>
>
>
> __________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus
> signature database 4113 (20090528) __________
>
> The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus.
>
> http://www.eset.com
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Join the Monthly Monetary Support program (MMS) and help improve
> tomorrow today in ACB.
> For details, contact Dr. Ron Milliman, MMS Program Committee Chair, by
> e-mail:
> rmilliman at insightbb.com or by phone at 270-782-9325 and get started
> making tomorrow look brighter today in ACB!
>
>
>
>
> --
> Please support the Florida Council of the Blind by using
> www.fcb.gttrends.com
> for your travel needs. 50% of the commissions from your travel purchases
> will be donated to FCB.
>
>

_______________________________________________
Nfbf-l mailing list
Nfbf-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nfbf-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
Nfbf-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nfbf-l_nfbnet.org/sherrill.obrien%40ve
rizon.net