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wanted me to do something, but I was curious. Why was the wife of the ex-king of Belgium in the United States and coming to see me about heart research. She came to see me one afternoon about five o'clock in 29 Beekman Place. She was very very beautiful. She was marvelously dressed. She has beautiful black hair and marvelous brown eyes, very very beguiling looking, and she said that she was there because she was bringing patients from Belgium to Dr. Robert Gross at the children's hospital in Boston to have them operated on for congenital heart diseases. I said, “How did that happen?”
She said her son, aged about 17, turned out to have a congenital heart defect and Gross had helped him, and when this was publicized in Belgium, the effect was so great that she had 8- or 900 requests to help people in Belgium who needed operations of this kind and there were no Belgian surgeons who could possibly do the operation as it was something developed in the United States. It was too tricky and nobody was trained to do it. So she had given her own money and was trying to gather some American money to bring people to Boston from Belgium to be operated on. Well, I thought this was a heroic enterprise. She would bring five or six at a time. She would be present herself. And she would finance the bringing of a relative for each patient. She was extremely interested, but only interested in surgery
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