Word: effler
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...receive some blood through minor channels. This can be a serious problem: the surgeon wielding his needle holder has to "take aim on a moving target." Moreover, stitches inserted while the heart muscle is tense may tear out. So surgeons at the Cleveland Clinic, headed by Donald Brian Effler, adopted the technique of injecting a heart-stopping chemical, potassium citrate, to let them operate on a completely stilled, relaxed heart. When the clamps are removed at operation's end, blood coursing through the heart washes out the chemical, and the beat is usually resumed spontaneously...
When he was wheeled into the operating theater, the small patient was lost among a task force of 15 doctors and nurses, led by Surgeon Donald B. Effler. Then, building palisades of clamps, scalpels, retractors, forceps, the surgeons opened the boy's chest and inserted tubes in the two great veins carrying used blood to the heart. When they clamped off these veins, they forced the blood out through the tubes, which fed it to a combined pump and oxygenator, the heart-lung machine developed by Cleveland Clinic's Willem Johan Kolff (TIME, Oct. 31). From the machine...
This gave the surgeons a "dry field" and a heart at rest. With deft scalpel, Surgeon Effler slit open the flaccid right ventricle, drew the remaining blood from it, and located the opening in the septum. He sutured the sides of the hole together. Then he took the clamp off the aorta and let blood from the artificial heart flow back into nature's heart. The potassium citrate soon washed out and-with no artificial prodding-the heart resumed its normal rhythm even before Effler could finish closing the ventricle wall. Last week, nine weeks after the operation...