Albuquerque Journal from Albuquerque, New Mexico • Page 7

TRENDS Page 7, Section A Albuquerque Journal Tuesday, January 26 1988 The Ciiirioiis Lite Vi- m) 1 Dr. Minear -r I 1 4i 3 I -V I -V 0 I 7 Stories by Pat Kailer JOURNAL STAFF WRITER JT VISIT WITH Dr. "A William Minear is like a f-K ramble through JL A-JL Encylopediaville. The conversation spins in the air, a multi-threaded web with strands spiraling off into the universe. Much of the talk is medical.

Some of it is about bones, a discussion that fractures into an theme. Minear, 77, a retired orthopedic surgeon, was chief surgeon and later medical director at Carrie Tingley Hospital from 1947 to 1956, and was in private practice in Albuquerque from 1956 until he retired in 1975. Since then he has worked his way through library stacks, skeletal hangouts, lectures and classes, papers, periodicals, labs feeding the kind of mind that pokes, ponders, retains, records and, most of all, wonders. He has written a short history of Carrie Tingley Hospital, another of orthopedic surgery in the state. Every two years he teaches a course in paleopathology, the study of disease from fossils.

He is also interested in modern diseases, such as the polio reoccurrences some former patients report. Mostly, the retired surgeon loves digging about in the long ago on matters medical and otherwise, as he did for his state history of orthopedic surgery subtitled, "From the Indian Medicine Man to the Founding of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons." The task was a pleasure for Minear, who spends so much time in the University of New Mexico medical library, he says he'd rent a room there if he could. From his research, he speculates on what Indians might have used for discomfort and pain, for fractures, for pulling arrows out "Oh, the pain," he says, a hand over his eyes. "They may have used plants like datura stramonium with atropine derivatives (atropine is used to relieve spasms and dilate the pupil of the eye). Or, more effective probably, the Texas red bean seeds, not a legume, despite the name.

Bill Martin, biology professor and curator of the UNM herbarium, helped me track it down. A pinch of it mixed with some crude tequila from the mescal bean would bring on a certain amount of intoxication and a long sleep, a pretty good anesthesia suffer in the cold I had arthritis in those days. I sent a telegram to Stanford saying I was sick and couldn't come." A Tucson doctor referred him to a job in industrial medicine at an Arizona mine. "That was 1938 and the Pony Express delivered the mail." During World War II, he did his orthopedic surgery residency in Memphis, where he practiced until coming to Carrie Tingley Hospital, then located in Hot Springs, which changed its name toTruth or Consequences in 1950. There he encountered the full force of the polio epidemic of the '50s.

He remembers sitting helplessly by children's bedsides. "I remember beautiful twin girls with absolutely flail arms. There was nothing we could do for them; they had no muscles to work with. It was the saddest thing." The 100-bed hospital, intended for indigent children, had some good board members, but also stormy administrative political tangles that took 50 years to straighten out, he says. The tangles resulted in shabby treatment of medical staff and surgeons, says Minear, who stayed nine years, longer than any surgeon before or after him.

"Chief surgeons have come and gone like autumn leaves," he wrote in his Carrie Tingley history "Thirty chief surgeons served during the last 50 years "It is difficult to understand why CTH (Carrie Tingley Hospital) surgeons were treated in such a cavalier manner as though they were biodegradable and easy to replace "Actually, many orthopedic surgeons including myself consider working with crippled children the most gratifying and rewarding work in the entire field of orthopedic surgery. Money is not the object. It seems that the importance of continuity in medical care was not thought of or mentioned by the various board members." The hospital, now in Albuquerque, is no longer solely orthopedic, he says, but is a first-class children's hospital. "They have the advantage of consulation with all the specialists hired by the med school." Every other year at UNM, the surgeon teaches paleopathology the study of ancient skeletons for pathologic changes in the bone. "This group wanders around old bones all the time, X-rays them and diagnoses them when there is enough information to make a diagnosis.

Anything that carries you off fast leaves no trace on the bones, but if something lasts IT 1 i 1 4 v. i JIM THOMPSON JOURNAL at Maxwell Museum. his telescope is 1935 Chevrolet fly wheels, he says, the standard, oil well casing. "And the 12 and one-half lens was ground at White Sands when they were experimenting with early rockets." Clyde Tombaugh the Las Cruces astronomer who discovered Pluto helped him design it. The surgeon also does a lot of cooking.

"My wife works," he says, "I play." His wife of 11 years, Charlene Hodgin, is a diagnostician for Albuquerque Public Schools. In the kitchen, too, curiosity is an ingredient. "I make a lot of mistakes," he says. "Some of my best dishes came by accident." He pauses a moment. Then, the trail begins to spin off again to wonderland.

"Have you ever seen frankincense or myrrh?" he says. "In this class I took we talked about it I managed to get a hold of some when polio weakened the muscle, it functioned a long, long time but was just not as strong and with the stress of aging Dr. Don Seelinger, a neurologist in Albuquerque since 1964, agrees. Over the years, he says, he has seen a handful of patients with post-polio sequelae. "I saw one the other day.

He had polio in 1930 on his 16th birthday and suddenly he and his wife notice he can't use his (polio-affected) muscles like he used to in golfing. "It's something we've known about a long time. There's some chronic weakness over the years with the parts most affected by polio gradually, after a long delay, showing deterioration of function, typically very slowly. Muscles severely weakened by polio which worked tolerably at one point may, as the person gets older and heavier, no longer be Respiratory problems, breathing limitations, can be a problem, too, says Seelinger. And, he adds, there are some progressive diseases, with similar symptoms with which the post-polio condition can be confused.

"Like the fasciculations, twitchy muscle movements, often seen in the Lou Gehrig disease, which kills people in a few years. "It's very important with those who have such fasciculations to get a good (medical) history." "We report on various types of arthritis, teeth, that sort of thing. We always learn a little bit; you can tell a lot from old bones, and seeing bare bones is the best way to study bone diseases." Dr. William Minear "With fractures, the ancients must have pulled the bone as straight as they could. Since they had no plaster of Paris, they ground up the bark of the cottonwood, boiled it and strained out the fiber; the substance that comes out hardens into a satisfactory cast." Orthopedic surgery lurched from the primitive and folk medicine level to 19th-century surgery with the Civil War, says the surgeon.

"Military surgeons assigned to the forts in New Mexico also took care of civilians. Before that, doctors couldn't make a living out here. "They had laudanum (opium in alcohol), you know," he adds in a conversational tone that makes you think he may have been there. And, lifting a knife from a table: "Here's the knife they used to amputate. See, it's sharp on both sides.

They'd go in past the bone, pull out from the front, and the back, sever everything. They had no way to connect blood vessels, anything, in the field." After the Civil War, physicians moved in, primarily to Las Vegas, which had the first medical society in the state, he says. Tuberculosis also attracted doctors here; many came after World War II. Minear, who says he probably was the state's fifth orthopedic surgeon, graduated from Northwestern University Medical School. He had accepted a teaching position in anatomy at Stanford University but, en route, stopped in Tucson.

"The sun felt so good," he says. "I thought, hell, I don't want to ly walking on the side of my foot." She has visited a general practitioner and four orthopedic surgeons without any suggestions for help or even information, she says. "I guess they thought since I'd had polio since I was little, it's always been like that, but it wasn't until recently I'm still getting by with a cane, but it's extremely frustrating. "I was totally unable to find anyone but Dr. Minear who even knew there was such a thing.

He gave me a magazine full of articles on it to read and agreed with me that that's what I've got." The magazine Orthopedics, July 1985 devoted the entire issue to "Post-Polio Sequelae." Articles discuss new problems of fatigue, weakness in previously affected and unaffected muscles, muscle pain and joint pain in adults who had polio as children as well as suggestions, including strengthening exercises, for management of the condition. "A clinic in Seattle and others around the country concentrate on this," says Schwartz, "but in the HMO I'm with, I have to exhaust all the orthopods and neurologists, exhaust the local resources, before they can refer me." Theories on the subject vary, says Minear. "Some believe the virus is still living, like the cold sore virus living in ganglia. I believe that 1 2 Dr. William Minear checks out several months, there's a little trace in bones.

"We report on various types of arthritis, teeth, that sort of thing. We always learn a little bit; you can tell a lot from old bones, and seeing bare bones is the best way to study bone diseases." For instance, he says, "We have a good syphilis skull we found at a ranch north of Pecos. The ancients around here were pretty healthy," he adds. "There was little syphilis, no leprosy none in North America at all. We also have contemporary skeletons unclaimed bodies from the Office of the Medical Investigator to study." In a medical history class, he learned the Greeks used to bandage a fracture "How the hell could a bandage hold a fracture firm? I can hear those bones grate together every time they changed a bandage.

Every three days they'd change the In 1937 on a hill overlooking what i if 1 Y. some boxes of bones for study dressing and after seven or eight, they'd put on a couple of boards to hold the bones straight." There's one big puzzler, he says. "No mention of opium as an analgesic comes up in Hippocrates' writings, yet Hippocrates had a clinic on the mainland and one off Asia Minor and Turkey where they grow it. To me that blank created more curiosity, than all the knowledge." While bone browsing has been a major focus, Minear's natural need to know and do has led him to serious music study, astronomy, deep sea diving, flying. In wintertime, out at the telescope in his back yard, he used to wear a WWII aviator suit "a blue bunny suit, know what that is? It's sort of like an electric blanket.

It worked off 24 volts and they used it for high altitude nights." The counterweight to balance JOURNAL was then Hot Springs, N.M. It For Some, Polio Symptoms Return Decades Later Some patients who had polio 30 or so years ago have reported reoccurrences to Dr. William Minear, medical director at Carrie Tingley Hospital for Crippled Children in the '50s when the disease was raging. One is Barbara Schwartz, 44, who was 2 years old when polio paralyzed everything but her left arm. She gradually recovered until only her right leg was affected.

At 9, she began attending clinics at Carrie Tingley Hospital in Truth or Consequences. She wore a brace until she was 12, when surgery enabled her to remove the brace. "I walked with a limp," says Schwartz, a forensic psychologist, "but in the years I lived in New York City, I could walk from one side of the city to the other." She returned to Albuquerque in 1970 to work at the Mental Health Center. In 1980 when she took a new job as director of the Mental Health Services for the Central New Mexico Correctional Facility at Los Lunas, her right leg began giving her trouble again. "I didn't notice it at first," she says, "then I thought it was just because I was having to walk more in the new job.

"But it kept getting worse. Now, with the weakening leg muscles, the footf.s pulling way overI'm actual Carrie Tingley Hospital was built was, named after the wife of former Gov. Clyde Tingley..