Word: kantrowitz
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...beginning of transplants was not premature. The surgical technique had been worked out years earlier, in animals, by Stanford University's Dr. Norman E. Shumway Jr., with Dr. Richard R. Lower, who is now at the Medical College of Virginia. Both Shumway and Brooklyn's Dr. Adrian Kantrowitz had their scalpels poised when South Africa...
...meeting of a rather special elite. Eleven of the 16 surgeons who have performed heart transplants gathered last week in Cape Town to consider what they had done, what they should do, and how they could do better. Why Cape Town? Explained Brooklyn's Dr. Adrian Kantrowitz: "Chris Barnard has been doing it better than all of us-that's why we are here." Barnard's aura was rivaled by the authority of Houston's Dr. Denton Cooley, who has three surviving patients, including one who is going back to work...
...Kantrowitz team was prepared for delay in finding a donor with Block's blood type, AB, Rh positive. This is found in only about 5% of Americans. By extraordinary chance, the first potential donor reported to Maimonides was AB positive. She was Helen Krouch, 29, a New Jersey office worker who had seemed in perfect health when she told her parents: "If I could save someone's life with my heart, I would do it. If I knew I were going to die, I'd like to die that way." Instead, she collapsed in a parking...
Helen Krouch weighed a scant 100 Ibs., and her heart was proportionately small. Louis Block weighed 170. Besides the difficulty of tailoring the transplant to fit, Surgeon Kantrowitz saw another problem: the donor heart almost certainly could not pump enough blood at first, although it might later increase its capacity. He decided to transplant the heart but to assist it for a while with a helium balloon pump inserted through a thigh artery and placed in Block's aorta. This device (TIME, Aug. 25) has worked well for five patients in shock and near death after heart attacks...
...operation took more than eight hours-longest of the five heart transplants so far performed. When it was over, the exhausted Kantrowitz said realistically: "I don't think any heart transplant can be considered a success until the patient goes home." Eight hours later, Block died...