Word: ohmura
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...Sadao Ohmura [who removed his own appendix-June 3] certainly did not prove that Japanese are more dexterous than Westerners...
...Sadao Ohmura, 32, a surgeon in the municipal hospital at Shizuoka, near Yokohama, had waited ever since he was a medical student for a chance to prove his contention that "we Japanese are more skillful with our hands than Westerners." Last week, with his abdomen tense and sore, he knew that the eagerly hoped-for day had arrived. Staggering into an operating room, he got a nurse to sterilize his midriff and hands, help him into a sterile smock and mask. Then he clambered onto the operating table. When Chief Surgeon Mikio Takahashi protested, Dr. Ohmura replied: "I have only...
Takahashi injected 2 cc. of anesthetic into Ohmura's spinal column, and Ohmura gave himself a local anesthetic. Then the nurse handed the patient a scalpel. Squinting belly wards, without the aid of a mirror, slender (137 Ibs.) Dr. Ohmura made a 2-in. vertical incision, helped Takahashi suture the blood vessels. Then, said Ohmura, he sliced into the abdominal muscle, proceeding "exactly as with several hundred appendectomies I have performed." The pain caused by his own finger probing into the wound made him feel faint, but Ohmura fished out the diseased appendix anyway, then "with sweat rolling down...
Five minutes later, after another self-administered shot of procaine, Ohmura snipped off the appendix, sutured the wound 50 minutes after he had made it. Home again and healthy a few days later, Ohmura had not proved that Japanese are more dexterous than Westerners (an American surgeon excised his own appendix in 1932 and a Mexican surgeon, from whom Ohmura got the idea, repeated the performance in 1946), but he had clearly demonstrated that they can be at least as eccentric. "I learned one thing," he reflected ruefully. "It really hurt...
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