Word: lungfuls
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Operations like this-sometimes on damaged valves, often to correct defects inside the heart itself-are being duplicated a hundred times or more each week in a dozen or so U.S. medical centers where heart surgery has become an everyday affair. Many surgeons use heart-lung machines more or less similar to Bailey's. Some chill their patients to a body temperature 10° or more below normal. Others may plunge a needle into a patient's heart and deliberately stop its beat for as long as they need to work inside it. Generally, they cut, stitch, stretch...
...with awesome energy. He sometimes schedules as many as four open-heart operations in a week, takes two a week in his stride. Last week he and his colleagues (including two other surgeons) in the Bailey Thoracic Clinic performed no fewer than 15 heart operations, one with the heart-lung machine and one to close a septal defect. Within Charles Bailey's lifetime, surgery has changed from a relatively blunt and blind art, executed singlehanded. into a skill supported by a team of experts and a world of machines delicate enough to approach the center of life itself...
...Plastic Lung. To the surgeon the heart is the center of a familiar but complex machine (see diagram). Used blood, from which all the body's tissues have removed nourishing oxygen, returns through the two great veins (superior and inferior vena cava) to the right upper chamber (auricle). It empties from there through the tricuspid valve into the right ventricle. This muscular chamber contracts and pushes the blood through the pulmonary valve and pulmonary artery to the lungs to pick up fresh oxygen. Reddened blood returns to the left auricle, passes through the mitral valve into the left ventricle...
Finger & Knife. Philadelphia's Bailey was impatient to touch down. He had strong personal reasons: as a boy of twelve, he had seen his father, a broker, die at 42 of a lung hemorrhage, the direct result of heart disease. After what Bailey considers less than average preparation for such a post (New Jersey's Rutgers University, Philadelphia's Hahnemann Medical College, a year's internship, four years of general practice in Lakewood, N.J., two years of intensive lung surgery), he was placed in charge of chest surgery at Hahnemann in 1940. He is now professor...
...heart in less than eight minutes. Moreover, under hypothermia the heart is especially likely to lose its regular beat and flutter uselessly (fibrillate), which may cause death. What was still needed was a pumping device to take over the functions of both heart and lungs for as long as necessary to operate. At Philadelphia's Jefferson Medical College, Surgeon John Heysham Gibbon Jr. had been working on such a device for almost 20 years. Bailey himself was experimenting with pumps when he hit on the chilling technique. In October 1952 Detroit's Dodrill announced that he had used...