Word: harkening
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...toughness of the human heart and its ability to withstand intrusion had made a deep impression on Brigham Surgeon Dwight Harken during World War II, when he removed shell fragments from servicemen's hearts. His main postwar concern has been with heart valves, especially mitral valves that have been damaged by rheumatic fever. In 1948, he was one of a few bold surgeons who first dared to slip a finger, with a tiny surgical knife at the tip, into a beating heart to separate the leaflets of a mitral valve partly closed by scarring...
...Harken! This...
Surgeon Dwight E. Harken, 49, operated on Mrs. Richardson to free the valve leaflets. Radical as it was, this surgery gave only temporary relief. Blood still poured back into the heart. What Dr. Harken wanted was an artificial valve. Plastic valves have been developed by Washington's Dr. Charles Hufnagel, but they cannot be placed as close to the heart as surgeons would like, and they click audibly. Dr. Harken went to work with designers and technicians at Davol Rubber Co. in Providence, and they devised what he calls a "caged ball valve...
...resembled a double bird cage. A silicone rubber ball, three-fourths of an inch in diameter, is encased in a slim, steel-wire cage in which it can move freely up and down. This in turn is enclosed in a second cage. In a ten-hour operation recently, Surgeon Harken removed one leaflet of Mary Richardson's faltering valve. Into the slit in the aorta wall he stitched a piece of Ivalon sponge, to which the bird-cage valve was attached so that it snuggled into the heart-aorta junction. Mrs. Richardson's tissues grew into the sponge...
...continually pushing back medical frontiers, in many cases along the lines sketched out by the great men of its early days. Endocrinologist George W. Thorn and colleagues are still exploring the adrenals, gradually outlining the role of a recently discovered and potent but little-understood hormone, aldosterone. Dr. Harken is working with famed Scientist Vannevar Bush on plastic valves which may actually replace the aortic valve in patients with some kinds of heart damage...