Editorial March 25, 1996 Issue

The next chapter in modern medicine

Mary Metzner Trammell

Day by day, according to the team of doctors attending him at Yale–New Haven Hospital, the fiery young university chaplain—William Sloane Coffin—was sinking toward death. He was suffering from pneumonia and exhaustion, after being jailed briefly in Mississippi for participating in a civil rights demonstration. Nothing the hospital team did could arrest the symptoms. Finally, Yale medical professor Sherwin Nuland scheduled emergency surgery for the next morning—in a "risky," last-ditch effort to save Coffin's life.

But that night, the patient's fever suddenly broke. The next morning, he was so much better that the operation was canceled. And in a few more days, Bill Coffin's "miraculous" recovery was complete.

What happened that night at the hospital? What was it that abruptly transformed a critically sick patient into an on-the-mend one? Dr. Nuland had no idea. So when he saw the hale and healthy Yale chaplain several years later at a wedding, Nuland asked him how he'd recovered with such dramatic speed.

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