Word: heart
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...much of recorded history, many doctors saw the human heart as the inscrutable, throbbing seat of the soul, an agent too delicate to meddle with. After a few incremental advances, that changed on a wide scale with World War II, when massive carnage forced military doctors to experiment with anesthesia and the other elements of modern surgery. Dr. Dwight Harken, a young Army surgeon, managed to remove shrapnel and bullets from some 130 soldiers' chests without killing one. Buoyed by such successes, in the postwar years surgeons made rapid advances in heart treatments. But they struggled to perform operations that...
Inspired by Shumway's success, the world's surgeons got back in the game. There were 172 transplants done in the U.S. alone in 1983, and as antirejection medicines improved in the 1980s, heart transplants grew more common. There were 1,647 in 1988. By 2007, the number had jumped to 2,210, according to the American Heart Association. As of May 2008, more than 85% of patients survived for a year...
...1960s, surgeons were ready to tackle hearts too far gone for repair. In 1964, a team of surgeons in Jackson, Miss., performed the first animal-to-human heart transplant on record, placing a chimpanzee's heart into a dying man's chest. It beat for an hour and a half but proved too small to keep him alive, a failure that revealed surgeons would have to use human hearts if transplants were to achieve enduring success. (See pictures of spiritual healing around the world...
...least four surgeons were poised to try. On Dec. 3 Dr. Christiaan Barnard of South Africa got there first, sewing the heart of a young woman killed in a car accident into the chest of a middle-aged man. After nearly four hours of surgery, a single jolt of electricity started it beating. "Christ," Barnard said. "It's going to work." And for a while, it did. The patient survived the operation, but the immunosuppressant drugs used to keep his body from rejecting the new organ weakened him. Eighteen days after the operation, he succumbed to pneumonia. (See Dr. Christiaan...
...Shumway, on whose surgical techniques Barnard had relied. His team of doctors and scientists developed a technique to determine whether a patient's body was gearing up to reject an organ, allowing them to tailor their prescriptions of immunosuppressants. The results were impressive. From 1968 to 1980, nearly 200 heart transplants were performed at Stanford. About 65% of Shumway's patients survived at least one year, and half hung on for five...