166
The Body Electric
Jim in a walking cast, and he left the hospital for the first time in
sixteen months. In another six weeks the fracture had healed enough for
us to remove the cast, and Jim started rehabilitation for his knee, which
had stiffened from disuse.
All the pin tracts, especially the ones nearest the break, were still
draining, and Jim asked, "Why not use the silver wire on this hole to
kill the infection? Then I'll be all done and won't have to worry anymore
about infecting the rest of the bone." I had to agree with his logic. If the
hole through the muscle to the outside healed shut, the infection would
be more likely to spread within the bone. However, I told him that the
positive current might prevent the hole from filling in with bone, mak-
ing a permanent weak spot there.
We put in the electrode and used the same current as before, except
reversing its polarity. I had no idea how long to let it run, so I ar-
bitrarily pulled it out after one week. Nothing much seemed to have
happened. The drainage might have been a little less, though not much;
but I was afraid to use the positive current anymore for fear of further
weakening the bone.
Jim left the hospital and didn't keep his next appointment in the
clinic. A year later he returned unannounced saying he was just traveling
through Syracuse and thought I would like to see how he was doing. He
was walking normally, with no pain, placing full weight on the right
leg. He said the drainage had stopped a week after he left the hospital
and had never recurred. X rays showed the fracture solidly healed and
the one pin tract I'd treated filling in with new bone. The pin site on the
other leg was still infected, and I said we could treat that in a few days,
since we'd improved our technique in the meantime. "No, I have to be
moving on," Jim replied. "I don't have a job. I don't know what I'm
going to do, but I know I don't want to spend any more time in hospi-
tals."
Sal had been graduated from the residency program a few months
after Jim was discharged in 1973, but before he left he spent all his free
time in the lab helping us test the bactericidal (bacteria-killing) elec-
trodes. A few previous reports had mentioned inconsistent antibacterial
effects, some with alternating current, some with negative DC using
stainless steel, but there had been no systematic study of the subject.
We tried silver, platinum, gold, stainless steel, and copper electrodes,
using a wide range of currents, on four disparate kinds of bacteria, in-
cluding Staphylococcus aureus, one of the commonest and most trou-
blesome.
Soon we were able to explain the earlier incosistencies: All five met-