Word: mitral
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Where Is the Villain? The earliest, most dramatic progress came in the field of heart surgery. When they could deal with disease by the use of scalpel and mechanical ingenuity, U.S. doctors have worked wonders, e.g., the complex blue-baby operation, opening the mitral valve inside the heart, heart-lung machines, even the use of a dog's lung to substitute for the patient's during an operation...
...Instead of rating rheumatic heart disease as an automatic reason for terminating pregnancy, doctors should consider operating to widen the scarred mitral valve in the heart, four Philadelphia researchers suggest in the A.M.A. Journal. Of eleven women who have undergone the operation, nine have already had normal deliveries. Pregnancy may actually be helpful after the operation, say the Philadelphians, because the altered hormone balance protects the heart...
Very interesting! TIME has created a surgical first for Dr. Frank Glenn. I know of no other instance where a mitral commissurotomy was performed on a patient with dextrocardia...
Without more ado, Surgeon Glenn cut into the chest of Edna, 37, a housewife who had had rheumatic fever at 18 and was now suffering from scarring and narrowing of the mitral valve in her heart. As the scalpel made swift but precise cuts and laid bare a rib, Dr. Artusio asked: "Can you nod your head?" Edna nodded. Dr. Glenn lifted a pair of shears and snipped out the rib. Then he cut deeper, through the layers of the heart sac, until the pulsing organ itself was laid bare. He plunged his gloved finger into it and wiggled...
...until they lose consciousness. Then he gives more oxygen and less ether, so that they edge back across the threshold into consciousness, and holds them at this level. Edna's case, filmed in color by E. R. Squibb & Sons for hospitals and professional groups, was typical of 120 mitral valve repairs on which Drs. Glenn and Artusio have worked-enough, they feel, to establish that ether analgesia is just what the surgeon needs for many hard-pressed patients...