Sing Sing Surgery

In one room on the top floor of Sing Sing's new prison hospital last week Warden Lewis E. Lawes stripped, put on a short white nightgown. In another room on the same floor Sing Sing's Chief Physician Charles Clark Sweet also stripped, put on a clean white short-sleeved shirt, pants and sneakers. While Dr. Sweet scrubbed up, Warden Lawes was wheeled into the operating room, laid out on the operating table by prisoner-nurses who are paid 5-c- a day. Sheets were spread over him so as to cover the scar of his old rupture operation, expose only his left leg. Just above the knee of that leg was an exceedingly painful lump the size of a lemon.

The lump lay beneath the scar of an incision made by a Manhattan doctor at the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled six years ago. To stitch up a hernia which Warden Lawes had incurred two years before while wrestling at New Orleans with Chaplain Robert Booth of Clinton Prison, the doctor had cleverly taken a strip of muscle from the patient's leg. The rupture incision healed quickly. The leg wound, on the contrary, took three months to close and ever since had given Warden Lawes trouble. Surgeon Sweet recently diagnosed the growth as a tumor which he was last week ready to excise.

As Dr. Sweet pulled on his operating gloves, Warden Lawes, under a brilliant, shadowless box light, felt a nurse swabbing the sore thigh with iodine. Another swung a table of instruments handy. A Negro artist serving a life sentence stepped up on a stool near the operating table. He had pad and pencil to picture the entire operation. Dr. Sweet jabbed a local anesthetic into Warden Lawes's leg. The Warden winced. The Surgeon sliced. The Warden felt nothing. The Surgeon clamped blood vessels, sliced some more, reached a fibrous capsule which enclosed the "tumor."

As Dr. Sweet cut into the tough capsule, Warden Lawes could hear the instruments grating. The Surgeon probed the hole, felt a hard mass. With forceps he pulled at the mass. It came loose, a strange-looking something the size of a plum. Surgeon Sweet paused several seconds while the Negro artist sketched the "tumor" and cavity, then tossed the "growth" into a catch basin, reamed the cavity in Warden Lawes's leg, put in a drain and some stitches, and was done.

A medical scholar, Dr. Sweet at once started to dissect the plum-sized mass. Instead of a fleshy knot, he unwrapped a tightly wadded gauze sponge left in Warden Lawes's leg during the rupture operation six years before.

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