Word: bladder
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Compared with other more complex organs, the bladder has a relatively simple structure and function. It is a remarkably elastic, muscular sac lying in the pelvic cavity. It receives urine from the kidneys through two slender tubes called ureters, expands to pint or even quart size as it stores urine, then contracts and discharges it from the body through a third tube called a urethra. People with no bladders, or with diseased bladders, usually live in great discomfort and with considerable danger of serious kidney infection...
Temporary Short Cut. B.C.M., a 50-year-old office manager, was a case in point. When he entered Detroit's Henry Ford Hospital, he had drained his bladder through artificial tubes for 27 years, suffered almost constant pain from chronic ulcers of the bladder. This week B.C.M. was ready to leave the hospital with a bladder as new as an infant's, as the result of a remarkable operation that causes the patient to grow a completely new bladder after the old one has been removed...
...three surgeons-Dr. Arthur Waite Bohne, chief of the Department of Urology at Ford, Dr. Paul Jackson Hettle of his staff, and Dr. Robert Wallace Osborn-began experimenting on dogs, succeeded in regenerating completely removed bladders by introducing a plastic mold around which a new bladder could grow. The technique worked so well that they decided to try it on humans...
Instead of a mold, which has to be removed in a second operation, the doctors used a three-by-four-inch. egg-shaped plastic bag. They removed B.C.M.'s diseased bladder, severing the ureters and the urethra where they entered the bladder, and put the inflated bag in its place. A Y-shaped tube ran through the bag. Its two arms were inserted through the dangling ureters to the kidneys and its trunk was passed through the urethra and outside the body through an incision (necessary only in males). This short cut from the kidneys permitted B.C.M. to live...
...sewed up, his body began reacting, building up a thick-walled pouch around the plastic bag. In 30 to 50 days, the pouch had completed the first of three distinct layers of tissue, and at the end of 90 days the smooth muscle tissue that discharges the bladder at will had been formed. Meanwhile, the pouch had adhered to the surrounding body tissues and to the severed ends of the ureters and urethra...