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TNR Online | The Choke Artist (1 of 4) (print) WHO ARE THE MYSTERIOUS CRITICS HUNTING HENRY HEIMLICH? The Choke Artist by Jason Zengerle Post date: 04.11.07 Issue date: 04.23.07 serious matter has been brought to my attention," the letter began. Addressed to an official in the Office for the Protection of Research Subjects at the University of California at Los Angeles, it accused two ucla medical researchers of participating in illegal human experiments on HIV patients in China. "These experiments consist of giving malaria to people already suffering from HIV and full-blown aids," the letter alleged, before going on to make an even more startling claim: "[T]hese experiments have been conducted under the direction of Dr. Henry J. Heimlich, known for the Heimlich maneuver." The letter, which was sent via e-mail in October 2002 and was from a "Dr. Bob Smith," was merely the first in a series of epistolary attacks against Heimlich. A few http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20070423&s=zengerle042307 (1 of 19)4/16/2007 2:24:46 PM TNR Online | The Choke Artist (1 of 4) (print) months later, editors at more than 40 publications--ranging from The New York Times to the medical journal Chest--received missives from someone calling himself "David Ionescu" that accused Heimlich of improperly taking credit for inventing a type of esophageal surgery. And then, in September 2003, the website heimlichinstitute.com went online. Its URL was almost identical to the official website of Henry Heimlich's Heimlich Institute, heimlichinstitute.org, but, rather than being dedicated to burnishing the doctor's legend, it was devoted to tearing it down. The site featured a long, angry indictment of Heimlich and accused him of all sorts of medical misconduct. The site's proprietor was listed as "Holly Martins"--the protagonist in the 1949 film noir The Third Man. The octogenarian Heimlich seemed an unlikely target of so many people's ire. He had entered into the pantheon of medical history not for inventing a disease-eradicating vaccine or for isolating the DNA of a killer virus but, rather, for developing an anti- choking maneuver that even a child could perform. And, yet, it is the very simplicity of Heimlich's lifesaving technique that makes it so ingenious; because anyone can perform the maneuver, anyone can save a life. Since its invention in 1974, it has become a standard First Aid procedure around the world; and, while it may have been hyperbole for Norman Vincent Peale to once declare that Heimlich "has saved the lives of more human beings than any other person living today," it was fair to say that, by the measure of name recognition at least, the maneuver had made Heimlich America's most famous doctor. But, after the letters started arriving, Heimlich could no longer rest on such laurels. When I met him in his office at the Heimlich Institute, he was under siege. Heimlich is tall and thin with a sharp nose and watchful gray eyes, giving him an almost avian appearance. He wore a coat and tie and, as he sat at his desk, he told me that he still put in a five-day work week--but what he was working on was unclear. The impressive-sounding Heimlich Institute, in fact, consisted of just two rooms in an http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20070423&s=zengerle042307 (2 of 19)4/16/2007 2:24:46 PM TNR Online | The Choke Artist (1 of 4) (print) administrative annex behind Cincinnati's Deaconess Hospital. On the afternoon I visited, Heimlich had cajoled his old secretary, who had recently been laid off due to lack of funds, to come in to help find some files for me; otherwise, he was the only person at the Institute. And, yet, even in its diminished state, Heimlich's office served as an impressive testament to his unique stature. Framed cartoon strips that referenced the Heimlich maneuver shared wall space with pictures of celebrities--Cher, Elizabeth Taylor, Ronald Reagan--who were saved by his anti-choking treatment. A giant toy caterpillar--"Heimlich," a ravenous character from the Pixar movie A Bug's Life--sat on the floor by his desk. Heimlich thumbed through a stack of newspaper articles. "I still get clippings from papers from all over the country whenever somebody saves a life," he said in a tone that sounded both boastful and surprised. Heimlich was copied on some of the letters attacking his reputation; but, initially, he paid them little mind, assuming no one would take the allegations seriously. Soon, though, the attacks began to exact a toll. Ucla launched an investigation into its researchers' work with Heimlich and ultimately found that one researcher had violated federal laws. Meanwhile, The Cincinnati Enquirer, Heimlich's hometown paper, ran a front-page story in which a rival doctor called Heimlich "a liar and a thief." Other doctors soon followed suit. Even the American Red Cross began to take a second look at the Heimlich maneuver. Heimlich and his family were traumatized. "It's an incredibly painful and difficult thing for someone to go through in the twilight of his life," Phil Heimlich, the eldest of the doctor's four children, told me. Heimlich eventually decided that he could no longer do nothing. He hired a lawyer and an investigator to determine who was behind the allegations--or, as Heimlich called them, "the hate campaign." It was an investigation that would take months and frequently run into dead ends. For a reason that Heimlich did not yet understand--a reason so shocking that, when he did discover it, it would shake him to his core--his mysterious critics had gone to great lengths to conceal their identities, wielding their anonymity as a potent weapon against his fame. But, although he was pained by the attacks, in some ways Heimlich actually relished the confrontation--because he had never shied away from a fight. Lost amidst the tchotchkes and celebrity photos in his office that testify to the maneuver's success is the story of just how hard he fought to get the medical establishment to accept it in the first place. Indeed, Heimlich's achievement was not so much the maneuver itself but http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20070423&s=zengerle042307 (3 of 19)4/16/2007 2:24:46 PM TNR Online | The Choke Artist (1 of 4) (print) the vigorous and sometimes underhanded campaign he waged to promote it. Heimlich's genius--one that has been adopted lately by everyone from drug companies to war planners--was to circumvent the experts and take his case directly to the people. A showman as much as a scientist, a brawler as much as a doctor, Heimlich was the P. T. Barnum of medicine--his career serving as testament to the fact that even the supposedly fact-based medical realm is susceptible to the phantom powers of personality and salesmanship. "This letter is to bring to your attention allegations that the International Society of Surgery, the World Journal of Surgery, and the American medical journal, Diseases of the Chest, have been defrauded by Dr. Henry J. Heimlich of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, best known for the Heimlich maneuver." --letter from "David Ionescu," April 3, 2003. n 1963, a Florida coroner named Robert Haugen published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that called attention to a frequently overlooked medical problem. Haugen detailed the cases of nine Florida diners who each collapsed and died while eating at a restaurant. Their deaths were initially attributed to natural causes, usually a heart attack. As Haugen wrote, it wasn't until his office performed an autopsy and discovered a large bolus of food lodged in each person's airway--"steak in four cases, beef in two, ham fat in one, kippered herring in one, and broiled lobster in another"--that the cause of death was correctly determined to be asphyxiation. Haugen dubbed this phenomenon "the café coronary" and implored the medical community to recognize choking as a serious problem. Medical researchers began working to come up with an anti-choking treatment more scientifically advanced than the age-old backslap. One doctor invented the "Throat-E- Vac," which, after being inserted into the victim's mouth and creating an airtight seal, supposedly sucked up whatever was obstructing the airway. Haugen himself marketed a nine-inch-long pair of plastic tweezers--the "ChokeSaver"--that would-be rescuers could use to grasp the offending piece of food in the victim's throat and pull it out. As the public furor over choking grew--with radio stations running public service announcements about the threat posed by "the café coronary"--it was clear that the doctor who devised a successful anti-choking treatment would be hailed as a medical hero. That Henry Heimlich found such a prospect appealing was hardly surprising. He had experienced his first taste of the glory that comes to those who save lives in 1941, http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20070423&s=zengerle042307 (4 of 19)4/16/2007 2:24:46 PM TNR Online | The Choke Artist (1 of 4) (print) when, as a 21-year-old passenger on a New York Citybound train, he rescued a fellow traveler after the train derailed in Connecticut--earning him a mention on the front page of The New York Times and a gold watch from the Greater New York Safety Council. After serving as a Navy doctor in World War II, during which he volunteered for "prolonged extra-hazardous" duty in the Gobi Desert, he returned to New York and specialized in thoracic surgery--a field that allowed him to hold a patient's beating heart in his hands.