Word: blalock
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With some misgivings, Johns Hopkins' Surgeon Alfred Blalock made a long incision and exposed the child's beating heart. Then, for three hours he worked at an operation no one had ever done before. The 15-month-old child on the operating table was a "blue baby" and was expected to die. Dr. Blalock believed that he and Dr. Helen Taussig, of the children's hospital at the Hopkins, had figured out how to save blue babies...
...blue baby is so-called because its lips and fingertips are constantly blue; its blood does not contain enough oxygen. A common cause is small or obstructed passages from the heart to the big pulmonary arteries that carry blood from heart to lungs. That is what Dr. Blalock thought he could...
Finally the surgeon took away the clamps and let the blood flow. Just as he had hoped, it flowed up through the curved artery, around and down into the pulmonary artery and to the lungs. The baby began to breathe more freely. So did Dr. Blalock and Dr. Taussig...
Last week, after Dr. Blalock had done 65 such operations, he suddenly found himself a hero in the press. Reporters had got wind of the fact that he had saved 80% of his "doomed" patients. All over the U.S., people read about curly-headed Judy Hackman, the Seattle two-year-old who was operated on last fortnight. They read of other blue babies in Maine, Virginia and Indiana, being prepared for a trip to Baltimore by hopeful parents...
Also saluted for their applications of artificial fever to cure disease were these pioneers: Charles M. Carpenter & Stafford L. Warren of Rochester, N. Y., Clarence Adolph Neymann & Stafford Lennox Osborne of Evanston, Ill., Leland Earl Hinsie & Joseph Rogers Blalock of Manhattan...