Word: appendix
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Many a U. S. appendix is still marked "Do not disturb"; but many another is no longer at home. Last week a famed specialist suggested (by implication) that more than one appendectomy he knows about was no better than a kidnapping. Several years ago, Mayo Clinic's famed Digestion Expert Walter Clement Alvarez started a notebook in which he collected experiences of patients whose appendixes had been reft from them. Last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association he told what he had learned from 385 patients. Of these, 130 had suffered at least one sharp bellyache...
...surgeon now clamps two hemostats near the upper, or open end of the appendix, closing the tube off both ways...
...With the scalpel ... he detaches the appendix squarely between the two clamps...
...appendix is carefully removed from the side of the colon . . . and now it is lifted out, the open end still clamped tightly shut by the hemostat...
...delicate work of suturing, or sewing up, begins. . . . The surgeon weaves the suture neatly around the base of the [sterilized] appendix stump so that it may be drawn closed in much the same manner you would close a tobacco sack. Next he will fold in the end of the appendix with a cross-stitch on top of it so there will be nothing left to cause trouble, such as adhesions...