Word: boerema
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Staph & Clots. The surgeon who pioneered the new trend is Amsterdam's Dr. Ite Boerema (TIME, Feb. 15, 1963), on hand last week to receive an honorary membership in the American College of Surgeons at its annual congress in Chicago. Dr. Boerema had begun by using high-pressure oxygen to combat gas gangrene. Reasoning that the microbes that cause gangrene are of types that thrive without oxygen, he succeeded in killing the microbes by flooding them with oxygen. Since then hyperbaric conditions in the operating room have proved a godsend when treating infants with congenital heart defects. Working...
...Boerema ruled out the use of a heart-lung machine because that, too, seemed dangerously drastic. Instead, he operated in a chamber at triple atmospheric pressure. With the children breathing 100% oxygen, instead of air with its 20% oxygen, they were getting 15 times the normal supply. They turned pink at once. Dr. Boerema clamped off the great vessels around their hearts to shut off circulation. Unhurriedly, he made a connection between two arteries. Thanks to the oxygen drenching, the children showed no ill effects from the blood-flow shut down, and emerged from the operations with oxygen concentrations...
Deceptively Simple. Success was dramatic. But progress from theory to high-pressure operating room had been no easy matter. Before he could risk his new procedure on children, Dr. Boerema had experimented widely with the effects of high pressure. In the process, he discovered that oxygen drenching was good for victims of gas gangrene, which is caused by a bacillus closely related to that of tetanus. When he figured out the explanation, he realized that he had done more than develop a new form of therapy; at last he knew enough about the effects of high pressure to start...
...principle is deceptively simple. Little oxygen is normally dissolved in the fluid portion of the blood, which relies on the hemoglobin in its red cells to carry oxygen, in a loosely combined form, to all the body's tissues. Dr. Boerema learned from animal experiments and his gas gangrene patients that it matters little during an operation whether the amount of oxygen carried by hemoglobin is increased: what counts is that under high pressure the watery part of the blood dissolves a considerable amount of gas. In Dr. Boerema's operations, that gas is life-saving oxygen...
...Dive. At Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston, where surgery on children's hearts was born under the meticulous scalpel of Dr. Robert E. Gross in 1938, Dr. William F. Bernhard wanted to try the Boerema technique. First he went to Newport to ask the Navy for an old compression chamber. The Navy wasted no time telling him to go home: just the tank he wanted had been gathering dust since 1934 in a Harvard lab, only a few yards from Children's Hospital...