Word: adrenaline
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...serious doctor no longer feels like Christ over Lazarus when he makes a dead patient's heart beat again. An injection of adrenalin or a tickle with the electrical pacemaker may do the trick. Or, if the patient is on the operating table with his abdomen or chest open, the surgeon may massage the heart into motion. Nonethe-less this stale medical story still looks like news and is printed, often on front pages a dozen times a year for the bench of those who cannot remember what they read...
Although the heart is an automatic motor, it cannot govern its own speed. Two nerves and two body chemicals do that. The accelerator nerve and adrenalin (hormone of the adrenal glands) speed up the heart. The vagus nerve and acetylcholine (hormone produced by the vagus nerve) slow down the heart...
...benzol poisoning, a certain toxic factor is developed in the blood which upsets the heart's regular timing. From two first stages of disorganization the heart can ordinarily recover. But if something mental or physical excites the accelerator nerve or stimulates the adrenals to pour an excess of adrenalin into the blood, the ventricles begin to fibrillate. And shortly the heart tires and stops...
...fibrillation and sure death, Drs. Nahum and Hoff advise elimination of poisons, physical disturbances and excitements; use of barbiturates or other drugs which reduce the heart's activity; administration of oxygen. In extremity, a surgeon might cut the nerves which cause the adrenal glands to excrete their exciting adrenalin. But drugstores now carry acetylcholine, the vagus hormone, with which a desperate doctor can often quiet ventricular fibrillation, set the heart pulsating smoothly again...
Often enough to annoy a surgeon, the heart of a patient on the operating table stops. The alert surgeon gives the patient an injection of adrenalin, or tickles the heart with a needle, or stimulates it with an electrical pacemaker (TIME, Dec. 19, 1932). Or if he is working in the cavity of the chest or abdomen he may massage the heart back into action...