Edward Johnson; Got Reagan to Wear Hearing Aid

Edward W. Johnson, 81, audiologist who persuaded Ronald Reagan to wear a hearing aid. Johnson was admissions director at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota when one of his daughters was diagnosed as deaf. That discovery led him to change careers: In 1951, he enrolled in the audiology program at USC. In 1955 he joined the Otologic Medical Group in Los Angeles as director of clinical audiology, a position he held for 30 years. During that time he treated many famous patients. He considered advising Reagan when he was in the White House to wear a hearing aid as the pinnacle of his career. Reagan was fitted with the device in 1983 in his right ear, in which he lost normal hearing after a movie set accident in the 1930s. The president’s embrace of the device was a boon to the hearing aid industry: After he began to wear a hearing aid, thousands of Americans shed their vanity and trooped to specialists for fittings, much the same way people began having checkups for colon cancer after Reagan’s colon cancer operations. In 1988, Johnson helped fit Reagan with a high-tech hearing aid that used a remote control the size of a credit card to control volume. On Tuesday of respiratory problems at U.S. Family Care Hospital in Montclair.

* Anne Sheafe Miller; First Patient Saved by Penicillin

Anne Sheafe Miller, 90, first patient to be saved by penicillin when it was considered an experimental drug. Miller made medical history in 1942 as she lay dying in New Haven Hospital with a streptococcal infection. Her temperature had spiked to almost 107 degrees. She had been treated with sulfa drugs, surgery and blood transfusions, but nothing worked. Her doctors turned to an obscure, experimental drug called penicillin, administering a small dose. Overnight, her temperature dropped sharply and she began a rapid recovery. News of the successful treatment spurred full production of the drug by American pharmaceutical companies. Born in New York, Miller was a nurse and wife of a former Yale University administrator. Her medical chart is in the Smithsonian Institution. On May 27 in Salisbury, Conn.