Word: lees
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When Dr. Horace Smithy, crack young (34) surgeon of the Medical College of South Carolina, first examined his patient, he thought her trip to Charleston had been in vain. Blonde Betty Lee Woolridge was an almost classic example of the wreckage caused when a heart is crippled by rheumatic fever. At 21, Betty Lee weighed only 85 pounds; veins in her neck stood out like whipcords; her abdomen was swollen with a fluid by-product of congestive heart failure. Doctors in her home town of Canton, Ohio had told her she had only a year to live...
...Betty Lee had come to the right doctor. For two years Dr. Smithy, ex-professional baseball player and college (University of Florida) boxer, had been working on a new technique for operating on the heart's valves. He had performed 121 operations on dogs† in the college laboratories, and had developed two new surgical tricks...
...their action. Then he developed a way of using procaine (local anesthetic common in dentistry) to control the violent, often fatal spasms that usually plague surgeons who have the courage to operate on the heart. Dr. Smithy was ready for his first operation on a human being when Betty Lee reached Charleston's Roper Hospital...
...last fortnight, Betty Lee was wheeled into the green and brown operating room. After cutting his way to the heart by conventional surgery, Dr. Smithy injected four cubic centimeters of 2% procaine into the heart muscle at the apex. Then he opened the heart wall, passed his valvulotome into the ventricular chamber, and cut away a segment of the thick tissue blocking the valve. That was the critical point...
...Betty Lee's heart kept its steady rhythm; the procaine had done its work. The operation was over in an hour and 35 minutes. The third day the patient sat up in bed; on the fourth, she was walking. By the fifth day her venous blood pressure, almost three times normal before the operation, was within the upper limits of normal. Her abdominal swelling was gone, her color was good, and she joked with visitors...