Athletes' Injuries

Whenever Harvard plays football, a heavyset, long-haired doctor stands on the sidelines, ready to rush on the field. He is Augustus Thorndike Jr., a former Harvard (1915-16) football player who has tended athletes at his alma mater for the last nine years. Popular "Gus" Thorndike collects Swedish furniture. He also has a mass of front-line data on sports and health in the U. S. In the New England Journal of Medicine last week Dr. Thorndike, who also teaches surgery in Harvard Medical School, published a technical article on injuries in sports. A meaty chronicle of sprains, strains, ruptures of the spinal column and spleen, fractures of the skull, collapses of the lungs, it might persuade a casual reader that a sports doctor's life is a gory one.

Actually, serious injuries during games are not common, and no one is more vehement than Gus Thorndike on the physical benefits of athletics. It is true, he says, that more accidents occur in football per playing hour than in any other game. But the injuries are usually slight, consist mostly of sprained ankles, wrenched knees, muscle bruises. Only compound fracture he ever treated in an athlete was suffered by a baseball player who slid to second base. Hockey seldom produces more than minor cuts, although the worst case Dr. Thorndike ever treated was a hockey player who lost his eye in a scrimmage.

Gus Thorndike has small patience with medical fallacies about athletics. Item: that injuries haunt athletes in later years ("rubbish"). He does hold that for best results doctors should follow all injuries through an athlete's college career. Before games he even tapes ankles which were sprained three years before.

Under proper medical care, says Dr. Thorndike, there is no danger of '"over-training" provided a player is young and exercises regularly. He is also convinced that there is no such thing as "athlete's [enlarged] heart," but cautiously withholds final judgment until Harvard has completed its definitive 20-year study of athletes' hearts. There is little high blood pressure among young athletes, he says.

Also false is the old chestnut that ex-football players get fat. Weight, Gus Thorndike believes, is determined by heredity. "Men who are headed for fatness," he says, "get fat." He admits that football players build big appetites which they may carry over into sedentary occupations.

Gus has encountered many weird accidents in his career. Once, during a football game, two Holy Cross bruisers knocked down a Harvard back, fell over him in a heap. But instead of picking themselves up, the three men began crawling around the field on all fours. Gus dashed out, fearing that they had gone crazy.

"What's the matter?" he cried.

Shouted the Harvardman, "We're look ing for my $60 tooth!"

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