Word: cooperating
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...movies that Manhattan's Dr. Irving S. Cooper showed to the American Medical Association last week were heartrending even to medical men familiar with the ravages of disease. There were pictures of adult victims of Parkinson's disease, or "shaking palsy"-men who could not stay the agitated tremor of their rigid, half-clenched hands, or could not walk except in jerky petits pas. There were children suffering from nerve disorders similar to Parkinsonism. During an attack, a pretty girl of eleven was doubled up, her whole body distorted and shaking. A boy the same age was bent...
...those pictures were of people who had not yet been operated on by Dr. Cooper. Next, the inventive neurologist paraded the same grateful postoperative patients before the professional audience...
...there were still more surprises to come. These patients, like famed LIFE Photographer Margaret Bourke-White, were operated on by techniques that Dr. Cooper, 39, now considers outmoded. The patients he really wanted to show off were the next to be presented: a housewife and a schoolgirl on whom he operated by freezing a pea-sized portion of the brain...
...Cooper's first approach, back in 1952, was to sever an artery supplying the nerve-cell complex. Though many patients got relief, several died, and an equal number were left worse off than before their operation. Next he tried injecting absolute alcohol into part of the brain near the thalamus. Then Dr. Cooper put the alcohol into the thalamus, as in Photographer Bourke-White's case...
Three in One. But the neatest, cleanest way to kill a specific segment of tissue in a living body is by rapid deep-freezing. Dr. Cooper's newest technique, used in almost 200 cases in the past year, is to put the patient on the operating table under a battery of X-ray machines. Using a local anesthetic, he saws out a dime-sized piece of the skull, then inserts a three-in-one tube, only 2 mm. (less than 1½ in.) in diameter. The tube slips painlessly through the insensitive brain to the deep-lying thalamus...