Word: patients
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...patient sits alone in a sterile-looking cubicle, electrodes taped to his chest and extremities, and hunches over a series of buttons on a metal console. He presses a button. On a viewing screen, up pops a question, such as "Do you suffer from shortness of breath?" The patient thinks he does, so he presses another button marked "Yes." The machine records this, and his yes or no answers to a hundred other questions. From the electrodes, a polygraph ("lie detector") notes which questions pack a heavy emotional charge for him. The machine produces a printed and punched, easy...
Feeling more and more like an automaton himself, the patient goes down the line. In one cubicle, a technician takes a blood sample, feeds it into a machine that spins out and counts the cells, measures the concentration of certain key chemicals. In another, the patient gives a urine specimen. Again, a machine reduces it to neat chemical symbols and figures...
...last the patient gets to see a physician. The man in white has the case history and lab reports before him. At the plaintive, immemorial question, "What do you think the trouble is, Doc?", the physician simply presses more buttons. The recorded data are fed into an electronic computer. The cybernetic brain compares the patient's symptoms with those of diseases it has previously learned, discards all but three, offers these to the doctor by code number. A couple of questions enable the doctor to rule out two, and he has his diagnosis. But there are several ways...
...Highway. In the abundant fourth generation (57 members), the doctors ignored all under 15 because narcolepsy is a tricky diagnosis in the young. Still, they found several cases. Their first patient's 20-year-old son had the not surprising habit of falling asleep in church, but carried it to the extreme of doing so while serving as an altar boy. Recently he was fired for sleeping on his job. and he has already had two serious accidents, in one of which he demolished...
...Patient and precise, slight (5 ft. 8 in., 150 Ibs.) Bernard ("Tut") Bartzen, 31, from Dallas, retrieved shot after shot at Chicago's River Forest Tennis Club, finally put away San Jose State's Whitney Reed, 26, by the score of 6-0, 8-6, 7-5, to keep his U.S. clay-court championship, and to prove again that he is without peer on clay, where the balls bounce high and true, although he may be an also-ran on grass, where the shots skid low and hard...