Word: keloid
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...beet-complexioned, so she was dubbed Aka Oni (Red Devil). After a nurse ordered her burned hands bandaged, they became gnarled like briar roots, and she lost the use of fingers and hands alike. For Shigeko's was one of the stubborn cases suffering both contractions and keloid growths (in effect, tumors of scar tissue). Shigeko could not work. She had no hope of marriage. And at the Nagaragawa Methodist Church she met scores of other girls in like plight. The Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto called them "The Hiroshima Maidens...
...Accepted Fact. Japanese plastic surgeons did their best: at Tokyo University Hospital, Shigeko had 20 operations, regained some movement in her neck and fingers. But the scar tissue kept coming back. Then U.S. Editor (The Saturday Review) Norman Cousins heard of the "Keloid Girls," began a campaign to get them another chance. The Hiroshima Peace Center Associates, a private philanthropic group, agreed to sponsor 25 of the most badly scarred Hiroshima Maidens on a trip to the U.S. for surgical treatment; the New York Quakers offered to find them homes. In charge (without fee) of the long, arduous program...
...What is a face?" Williams wrote. "What has it always been, even to the remotest savagery? A battleground. Slash it with sharp instruments, rub ashes into the wound to make a keloid; daub it with clays, paint it with berry juices. This thing that terrifies us, this face upon which we lay so much stress is something they have always wanted to deform, by hair, by shaving, by every possible means. Why? To remove it from the possibility of death by making of it a work...
Most of the scars seemed to result from the patients' burns, but there were puzzling exceptions: when a skin graft was taken from an unburned part of a patient's body, a keloid often developed there too. Could the victims' exposure to fission products-neutrons, gamma" rays, etc.-have something to do with it? The doctors did not know for certain, but they suspected that keloids might be ugly forerunners of cancer...
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