Word: mitral
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Finger in the Heart. In no area of surgery has the anesthesiologist played a more vital role than in operations inside the heart. Ten or 15 years ago, little or nothing could be done for the patient with a constricted mitral valve (usually the result of rheumatic fever). Then surgeons at .Philadelphia's Hahnemann Hospital devised a finger-tip knife for opening the valves. The trick was to do it without killing the patient...
Delicate Dozens. With their own adaptation of Dr. Keown's technique, surgical teams at the University of Illinois hospitals have performed 200 operations on the mitral valve without a single death in the operating room (and few deaths afterward). Dr. Sadove reported. Then he spelled out the dozens of delicate steps which the anesthesiologist takes in each such case. The key steps give a good idea of how far anesthesiology has advanced beyond the mask-and-needle stage...
...Rubber Pistons. In July, they found their volunteer: a man of 41 whose mitral valve (between the upper and lower quarters of the heart's left side) was not working right because of rheumatic-fever scars. His chest was opened. Through a vein leading from a lung, a tube was slipped into the upper left side of the heart. This drew blood out of the heart to the six-cylinder pump, where fingerlike rubber pistons boosted it on its way. From the pump another tube led the pulsing blood back to the patient's aorta, where it would...
...happened that the patient's heart was so enlarged that Dr. Dodrill could not expose the mitral valve as he had hoped to do. He had to work "blind," with his finger in the heart, manipulating the valve flaps -a standard operation for this condition, performed regularly without a pump. The patient got along fine, and his valve now works better...
Last month, at Georgetown University Medical Center, the young woman (now 30) became the first patient in medical history to be fitted successfully with an artificial aortic valve. (Boston surgeons have slipped a plastic ball into the mitral valve-TIME, March 10). Though she will still have to follow doctor's orders (digitalis, salt rationing and plenty of rest), she is a changed woman-vigorous, gaining strength and hope, and free from the pain of angina...