'Heal-In' Ends as Doctors Settle for Council's Plan

Interns and residents at Boston City Hospital ended the "heal-in" yesterday which has choked the hospital's wards for the past three days.

Dr. Phillip Caper, a Harvard resident physician who organized the heal-in, announced that the 450 house officers -- who come from Harvard, Boston University, and Tufts medical schools -- had decided to accept a "program of salary increases" which the executive committee of the Greater Boston Hospital Council worked out earlier in the day.

No details of that program were announced yesterday, but it is believed to call for a base of $6600 a year for interns. The house officers, whose base pay is now $3600, were asking for a plan which would range from $7200 for first year men to $10,200 for fifteen-year residents. The interns had said yesterday they would not accept a compromise.

They had hoped that the heal-in, in which they filled the hospital by accepting an unusually large number of patients, and giving them more intensive care, would dramatize their demands. "We feel that we have made our point -- a decent wage for house officers," one of the heal-in's leaders said last night.

He said that the house officers had been guaranteed by Dr. Andrew P. Sackett, commissioner of public health, that Boston City Hospital's board of trustees would abide by the salary increases worked out by the Greater Boston Council.

Sackett, he said, would not give them any details of the plan, but the house officers were able to get them "from other sources" before making their decision.

It was not clear yesterday how boards of trustees at other Boston area hospitals would react to the Council's plan. No board is forced to follow the council's recommendations but Boston hospitals have an informal agreement to maintain reughly equal wage levels.

Thus the pledge by Boston City's trustees to a side by the council's recommendations for higher salaries could have widespread local, if not national repercussions.

Earlier in the day, the interns and residents won support from senior men at the hospital.

At a meeting of the City Hospital's executive committee yesterday, directors of the medical and dental services unanimously confirmed their support of the heal-in. Although the directors had voiced sympathy with the house officers' demands before the heal-in, on Wednesday there was dissent about the ethics of the heal-in. While Dr. William V. McDermott Jr. '38, director of Harvard services, enthusiastically backed the heal-inners,' Dr. John J. Byrne of B.U. expressed disapproval