Word: blalock
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...basketball and made Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Texas. After getting his M.D. degree at Johns Hopkins University, he stayed on as an intern and resident at the Hopkins' University Hospitals and served as what he calls "a very junior assistant" to the great surgeon Alfred Blalock, who was soon to perform the world's first blue-baby operations. That association determined Cooley's future course, and he has been a heart man ever since...
Died. Dr. Alfred Blalock, 65, leading U.S. heart surgeon who teamed with his chief pediatrician, Helen Taussig, in 1944 to perform the first Blalock-Taussig "blue baby" operation, which has since restored to health an estimated 10,000 children born with congenital heart defects; of cancer; in Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he was surgeon-in-chief from 1941 to last July. Until Blalock's operation, "blue babies" (so called because of their blue lips and finger tips) were considered incurable, suffered from such acute lack of oxygen in their bloodstreams that they either died shortly after...
...that is necessary during fetal life, but should close automatically soon after birth). He followed this with a more daring operation in 1946 to remove a narrowed section of the aorta-a crippling and potentially fatal defect with which some babies are born. Baltimore's Dr. Al fred Blalock opened the field for surgery directly on a malformed heart with the first blue-baby operation, which he devised in 1944 with Pediatrician Helen Taussig...
...from a set of four inborn defects in the heart and arteries, known as Fallot's tetralogy. The effect is to recirculate much blood from which oxygen has been naturally removed in the veins, and send only part of it to the lungs for re-oxygenation. The Taussig-Blalock operation, devised years before open-heart surgery with a heart-lung machine became possible, is a compromise: it consists of purposely creating a fifth defect-a connection from the aorta to the pulmonary artery-to shunt more blood to the lungs and thus overcome some of the effects...
...basic defects of the major arteries and the chambers of the heart itself. But a major problem still confronting the blue babies' doctors is to decide which operation is best suited for each patient, especially since the more drastic operation carries a higher risk. At the Hopkins, Dr. Blalock and his associates still decide to rely on the Taussig or a similar operation about once a week...