L. Frank Baum's Cardiac Disease
L. Frank Baum’s cardiac disease Inset in image of narrowed coronary arteries (CORBIS), Lyman Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Getty Images. Robert S. Pinals, MD, and Harold Smulyan, MD Dr. Pinals (AΩA, University of Rochester, 1955) is clinical after a life of repeated failures in several occupations, to find professor of Medicine at the University of Medicine and his true calling. Dentistry of New Jersey—Robert Wood Johnson School of Baum was born in 1856 in Chittenango, a small town in Medicine, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Dr. Smulyan (AΩA, upstate New York. His father, a barrel maker, moved to nearby University of Buffalo, 1953) is professor of Medicine in the Syracuse in 1861, and, after several successful business ven- Cardiology Division of State University of New York Upstate tures, purchased a splendid farm just north of the city. Nearby Medical University in Syracuse, New York. was the Plank Road, a toll road farmers used to bring their produce to market downtown. Worn planks were constantly he legendary author of the Oz stories, L. Frank Baum, being replaced by a Tin Woodman (or “Tin Man”), the basis succumbed to congestive heart failure in 1919 at age for the character that would reappear in Baum’s fiction years sixty-two.1–4 He died almost twenty years after pub- later. Young Frank was a frail, sensitive child, less physically Tlication of his first successful novel, The Wonderful Wizard active than other children ostensibly because of a defective of Oz, which has remained enormously popular in print, on heart.* He had “heart attacks” manifested by syncope, often stage, and in the movies.5 Baum subsequently wrote thirteen Oz novels, the last, Glinda of Oz, literally on his deathbed.
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