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

Sat May 30 00:33:12 UTC 2009

Hey Judy,

Thank you for sharing this facinating article. What a fabulous physician! 

Kathy

-----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 9:18 AM
To: NFBF LISTSERVE
Subject: [Nfbf-l] FW: [fcb-l] FW: [leadership] Very Interesting Obit
inToday'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
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
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