Word: lillehei
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Fifty years ago, in my boyhood, a guy who blew out a mitral valve was sent home to sit in a sunny corner and play cribbage until congestive heart failure swept him away. Open-heart surgery was big news. One of the pioneers was C. Walton Lillehei at the University of Minnesota, a local celebrity on the order of Dr. Albert Schweitzer. The operations were enormously expensive, the survival rate around 50%, and Minnesota has always had plenty of finger waggers to remind you that all that money spent to repair that fat man's aorta could have bought nourishing...