Word: catgut
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Vermeer wasn't a great draftsman, and he could be an oddly clumsy one in some details of the human body--though he excelled in virtuoso rendering of inanimate objects, catching the moony sheen of pearls or the precise tautness of a viol's catgut strings. As an analyst of human character, he was quite vapid compared with Rembrandt or Frans Hals...
...last discarded his tennis apparel, he did so with a bit of chagrin. The 1974 Harvard tennis team had not lived up to his preseason expectations, finishing fourth in the Ivy League, but Barnaby's inclinations were to blame neither the team nor its schedule. Instead, the godfather of catgut vent his wrath in the direction of God. And with good reason...
...than the civilians. Their primary hospital is now a bunker. Some men have been there for as long as a month, with more lightly wounded comrades cooking for them over smoky wood fires on the bunker steps. There is no sterilization for instruments, and there is a shortage of catgut. Dr. Nguyen Van Quy, who performed 200 operations in two months, has taken to using thread from sandbags for sutures...
...more than 18 centuries, the world's surgeons have mainly used catgut to stitch up their patients. The chief reason is that the body's enzymes can absorb catgut (actually made from cattle and sheep intestines), and the sutures usually disappear within 90 days. Because the material consists of animal protein, though, it has one flaw: it causes inflammation around the very wound it is supposed to heal...
...completely absorbable, non-irritating suture material has been developed at Lederle Laboratories' Davis and Geck Division in Pearl River, N.Y. To create the catgut substitute, which is trade-named Dexon, chemists tested 225 synthetic compounds before they hit upon polyglycolic acid, a polymer or long-chain molecule that is chemically compatible with the human body. They spent four years taming the polymer and learning how to braid it into a multiple-strand yarn of suture size...