Word: knottings
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...winner for suturing blood vessels and transplanting living organs, collaborator with Charles Lindbergh on the "mechanical heart''; of prolonged heart trouble; in France. Son of a Lyons silk merchant, chunky, bald, beret-wearing Carrel could reputedly thrust his thumb & index finger inside a matchbox, tie a catgut knot impossible to undo with two hands. In nearest-complete secrecy, he experimented in his black-toned, dustless Manhattan laboratories, later on isolated St. Gildas Isle off France. A wit, connoisseur, inspired but abstemious gourmet and longtime agnostic, he received the last rites of the Roman Catholic church; his final illness...
...brawls, smokes out the skunk who killed his boss and, in the course of preventing a dove-soft eastern girl from being cheated of her inheritance, learns that he himself is the rightful heir to the K.C. Ranch. By this same bold fiat of plotting, which slices the Gordian knot paper-thin, it is also shown that he and the young lady are cousins, ineligible for wedlock. This leaves the weather clear and the track fast for a neck-and-neck finish, shared by Mr. Wayne and a fierce, rough-coated local filly (Ella Raines...
...Clifford W. Ashley, "the simple act of tying a knot is an adventure in unlimited space." He never saw Houdini or a successful lynching. But he once halted an operation in Boston to see how the surgeon made his stitches fast...
Ashley solved his first knotty problem in 1884, at the age of three, when an uncle taught him to tie a reef (square) knot. Since then he has hobnobbed with sailors, cowboys, circus men, weavers, tailors, butchers, truck drivers, Boy Scouts, steeple jacks, cobblers, electric linemen, "and with elderly ladies who knit." He has watched oxen slung for shoeing, accompanied tree surgeons aloft, shadowed poachers to examine their snares...
Taken tangle by tangle, Knots is instructive and often amusing. From Archer to Yachtsman, it describes the knots of nearly 100 occupations, including the baker's pretzel twist and the parachutist's sling. It gives explicit instructions on how to spit and truss a fowl, lace a football, mend a garden hose, string pearls, fly a kite, string a fiddle, tie a necktie. It offers such engaging oddments as the Norfolk-to-Washington Boat Heaving Line Knot, Department-Store Loop, Cuckold's Neck Knot, Bathrobe Cord Knot...