Reading Comprehension

I held a seminar about Weick and Westrum yesterday. While preparing for it, I noticed a peculiar shift of meaning in Weick's account of Caffey's original paper on BCS. Here's what Westrum says:

He published an article reporting six such cases in 1946, some eight years after his initial observations.

And here's how Weick presents it (albeit not, unfortunately, as a paraphrase of Westrum's point):

Some cases in the article were reported 8 years after they had first been observed.

(Westrum's spelling out of "eight" and "six" is the generally accepted way to do it, by the way.) As I read Westrum, he is saying that the paper was published roughly eight years after he had begun to notice the anomalies. Now that may, of course, mean that at least one of the cases was exactly eight years old at the time the article was published, and it is, in one sense, the first time the cases are being "reported". But Weick's sentence, to my mind, subtly misreads Westrum to be talking about the reporting of the cases (to medical authorities or the police) rather than doing the reporting himself in the 1946 article.

Weick might rewrite Westrum's sentence as follows:

He published an article describing six cases of BCS in 1946. Some of these cases had been reported eight years after they were first observed.

But I think Westrum was really saying:

In 1946, some eight years after his initial observations, he published an article reporting six cases of BCS.

Westrum is using "some" to mean "roughly" or "about"; he is using it as an adjective. Weick is reading it as a pronoun. I'm going to look into this today to be sure, but I think grammar actually rules out Weick's reading.

Update: Weick might have been reading Westrum's sentence as follows:

He published an article reporting six such cases in 1946[;] some [of the cases were thereby being reported] eight years after his initial observations.

And this sentence might even be true. But that still does not justify Weick's gloss, which leaves out the idea that Caffey's article constitutes the reporting. Weick doesn't explicitly say so, but he does leave open the possibility that these case had been reported eight years after their initial observation. Both the observation and the reporting could have been done by someone other than Caffey. But that's not what Westrum is saying.