Word: baileys
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...Bailey made another contribution (January 1952) with an operation to close a hole in the wall between the auricles. The right auricle is bigger than it needs to be and is soft and pliable. So Bailey pressed the outer wall down over the septum, covering the hole in it, and joined the two together with a circular line of stitches. This made the right auricle into a doughnut-shaped chamber, with excellent results for the patient. Says Bailey with professional pride: "Technically, this is the best accomplishment I have to my credit, because it's so nearly perfect...
...problem was that, at normal body temperature, the brain suffers irreparable damage if deprived of blood for more than about four minutes. But if the body's temperature is lowered, its tissues need less blood, and the brain can survive without damage for twice the normal time. Bailey wondered whether by chilling the patient (hypothermia) he could reduce the body's blood requirement to a level where some sort of pump could handle it. Then the bold idea struck him: Why not try hypothermia alone if he needed only six or eight minutes inside the heart...
...girl with a big hole between her auricles received standard anesthesia, was then put in a 6-ft. kitchen-type freezer until her body temperature dropped to 75°. The patient's circulation was slowed at first, then stopped by clamps. Bailey slit open the auricle, put a patch over the hole and closed the heart, with two minutes to spare against his eight-minute limit. But because of air trapped in the heart, the patient died. History's first truly open-heart operation in a dry field looked like a failure...
Only four days later Floyd John Lewis, one of the leaders in a team of brilliant young heart specialists assembled by Surgery Professor Owen H. Wangensteen at the University of Minnesota, did a virtually identical operation on a five-year-old girl, and she survived. Within ten days Bailey repeated the operation with complete success...
...death. What was still needed was a pumping device to take over the functions of both heart and lungs for as long as necessary to operate. At Philadelphia's Jefferson Medical College, Surgeon John Heysham Gibbon Jr. had been working on such a device for almost 20 years. Bailey himself was experimenting with pumps when he hit on the chilling technique. In October 1952 Detroit's Dodrill announced that he had used a pump developed in cooperation with General Motors research engineers to bypass the left side of the heart. In May 1953 Gibbon announced the breakthrough...