Word: esophagus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Hsin Chiao bar, habitues advise visitors to stick to the excellent domestic beer. Chinese champagne ($2 a bottle) is cloyingly sweet, and the fiery mao-tai, a vodka-like spirit distilled from millet that is a favorite formal banquet tipple, reams out the unwary Western esophagus like a Roto-Rooter...
...surgeon places an unnecessarily tight cast on a young boy's broken leg and ignores his complaints of discomfort. The leg develops gangrene and has to be amputated. The boy's parents sue the doctor. Another surgeon accidentally punctures a 40-year-old man's esophagus. An infection develops, and the patient hovers on the brink of death. The patient sues the surgeon...
...hiatus is simply an opening, the word being derived appropriately from the Latin verb hiare, to yawn. The esophagus (gullet), which carries food from the mouth to the stomach, passes through a hiatus in the diaphragm, the muscular wall that divides the chest and abdominal cavities. A hernia is a rupture, or break, usually in a muscle, that permits an organ to protrude through it. A hiatal hernia is an enlarged opening at the point where the gullet goes through the diaphragm. A relatively small hernia will permit the lowest part of the gullet to slide upward into the chest...
Burp Speech. Normal speech is impossible without a larynx, but thousands of patients who have had their larynxes removed because of cancer learn to speak by swallowing air and expelling it while they vibrate their gullet muscles. In this esophageal or "burp" speech, the esophagus (gullet) substitutes for the windpipe. Although the Ghent surgery team headed by Professor Paul Kluyskens would say only that Borremans' larynx had to be removed, his complaint was almost certainly cancer. Knowing that many laryngectomy patients fail to learn esophageal speech, Kluyskens decided that a new larynx would offer Borremans a great advantage...
Though he is still officially on the staff of Baltimore's Sinai Hospital, Berman gave up his general practice in 1962. During a busy career as a surgeon, he pioneered such things as plastic replacements for worn-out human parts (he created a plastic esophagus for cancer victims), made one of the first heart transplants between dogs in 1957, and at the peak, earned $80,000 to $90,000 a year. After making big sums in Maryland real estate, he became bored with medicine. "I enjoyed it for 15 years," he explains. "Then I found I didn...