Word: mitral
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Bailey does not believe that the technique can be used in mitral-valve operations, or that it will be much good for older patients whose heart muscles are "worn out." But it gives the surgeon more time and a "dry field" (without blood flow) to operate on young patients whose cases might otherwise be too risky...
...heart patient has a bottleneck in the mitral valve, it can be opened with a tiny knife on the end of the surgeon's finger. But this daring operation will do little good if the valve to the aorta (main artery) is also narrowed, and there has been no way to repair this second defect. Dr. Charles P. Bailey of Philadelphia, who developed the first operation, now has another for opening the aortic valve: he pushes piano wire into the valve through the heart, and uses it as a guide for a spreader which opens the valve...
Ever since a siege of rheumatic fever at eleven, Mary Dansereau had been facing the prospect of an early death. The mitral valve of her heart had become calcified. To maintain circulation, her damaged heart had to work harder, and it was slowly giving out. For four years she had been a semi-invalid, unable to do much for her two children, and so weak that she took an hour to make...
...Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, surgeons cut into her heart and enlarged the opening of its mitral valve. They anchored a small (½-in.) lucite ball on a steel suture just below the flaps of the valve. The plastic ball can move just enough to allow blood to drain downward into the ventricle. It moves up to act as a stopper in the mitral valve when the heart contracts to pump blood into the aorta...