Word: heart
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Twenty-five years ago on Nov. 15, Baby Fae's world-famous heart stopped beating. But the medical implications of her short life, said her surgeon, Dr. Leonard Bailey of California's Loma Linda University Medical Center, were just beginning. On Oct. 26, 1984, Bailey had stitched a walnut-sized baboon heart into Stephanie Fae Beauclair's tiny chest, making her the first infant to receive a cross-species heart transplant. Amid protests from animal-rights activists, Americans hung on every thump of her simian heart for three short weeks. When her weakened body went into kidney failure and finally...
...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...
...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...
...preliminary autopsy revealed that the teacher died of an apparent heart attack while playing basketball, and a ministry spokesperson told the China Daily newspaper that the death was a "coincidental medical incident" and not related to the vaccine. No details on the second victim have been released thus far. (See pictures: "Soccer in the Time of Swine...