11
January, 1944
The Pneumonia Patient
With "Heart" Trouble
By PHILIP B. MARQUART Captain, Medical Corps
a S I HEADED down the r a m p toward Ward 47, I was tingling L w i t h disappointment. W h y ward? The nurse was ready for ward rounds as I entered. Reluctantly', I hung my stethoscope around my neck. The ward boy rolled the chart holder to the door. As I entered the large ward room, he shouted, “Ward: Atten tion!" I gave them “At Ease,” and turned to bed number one. The record informed me that George had been making slow progress in recovering from pneumonia, and his X-ray had shown no improvement whatever. Even now he was complain- {The author is an outstanding Christian, a graduate of Harvard Medical School, trained in neuro psychiatry. Before his entrance into military service, he practiced medicine and neuro psychiatry in Texas. He is furnishing fur readers of THE KING’S BUSINESS’ a fas cinating series of medical • and psychiatric case studies of soldiers. The persons con cerned are those of the doctor’s own ac quaintance—men to whom has been given, not only help for their physical and mental distresses, but also that spiritual benefit which only the acceptance of the Lord Jesus Christ can bring .—EDITOR.]
ing about pleuritic pain at the back of his chest. “ X am having a sticking pain over my heart, too,” he said, indicating a point near his left breast. “ Yes,” I exclaimed eagerly. “ And what else?” “Well,” added George, “when I have the pain, my heart starts beating fast and turning over in my chest, and then I get a catch in my breath so that it feels like smothering.” By this time I was thoroughly in terested. Here, in the very first pneu monia patient, was a nervous symp tom, due not to his pneumonia at all, but arising from some anxiety in his life. “But you’ve had this pain before you were .in the Army, haven’t you, George?” I asked. "Yes, I have, Sir. I’ve had it for four years, off and on. It started when I was fourteen. It isn’t heart trouble, is it, Captain?” “No, it is not heart trouble, and you have no need to worry about it. When I have time, I shall examine it —and it can be overcome, I believe.”
When I had a. chance to return and consider George’s case, he was eager to -learn more about his trouble. I ex plained to him that such symptoms as he described were not due to some thing wrong in the organ which pumps the blood around the body, because the condition was worse at night when he was lying quietly trying to go to sleep. Rather, it was something wrong in his experience—in that portion of the personality which we call the “heart” (Matt. 15:18-20). This was a real pain over his heart —not imaginary—and it therefore had real causes; but the causes were some upset emotions in his life.-He insisted that he knew nothing that had upset him in that way. But the answer to that is found in Jeremiah 17:9: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” We cannot know our own heart, because it is the subconscious part of us. George had to be stimulated and challenged to do a bit of de tective work on himself in order to find the real, forgotten causes of his
should the C. O. order me, a psychia trist, to t a k e over this pneumonia
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