Word: becks
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Chance-This scene of medical levity was sombrely interrupted when Dr. Claude Shaeffer Beck, skillful Cleveland surgeon whose preferred operative area is the heart, rumbled: "The death rate from sclerosis of the coronary arteries is appalling. Of the physicians who died during the first half of this year 14.6% were given a diagnosis of coronary thrombosis, coronary sclerosis or angina pectoris...
Lights in the auditorium were dimmed. The photograph of a very sick man flashed on a screen. Continued Dr. Beck: "This man [on the screen] is a surgeon, a fellow of this College, who came to me because he knew of my work and had confidence in it. He had diabetes and other complications which made him a bad risk. But he said, 'You get me off the table and I'll do the rest...
...Beck did get his doctor-patient off the operating table, has managed to keep him alive for months. Like all muscles, the heart requires the nourishment of blood. It gets this blood through two coronary arteries which tap off from the aorta just after it springs from the hollows of the heart. If a coronary artery is clogged by a blood clot (thrombus), or is narrowed by hardening, the heart cannot get enough blood to survive. Before it dies, it causes the terrifying signal of pain called angina pectoris...
...Beck told his colleagues at Philadelphia that a patient who came to him for an operation to relieve hardening of a coronary artery had a 50-50 chance to survive. Taking the chance, Surgeon Beck opened the man's chest, detached a length of pectoral muscle, made a hole in the sac called pericardium, which encases the heart, and with a burr abraded a raw spot on the beating heart. Against that raw spot he placed the raw end of the pectoral muscle. Within a short time blood vessels grew out of the muscle and into the heart, thus...
Last week Dr. Beck promised to cut down his 50% operative mortality. He has also developed roundabout circulation in a man's heart by putting some pulverized beef bone in the pericardial cavity. This irritated the pericardium, caused it to cleave to the heart muscle. The blood vessels, which are numerous in the peri cardium, then sent branches into the heart, thus making a graft of the pectoral muscle unnecessary...