Word: olivecrona
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Promptly Poet Karinthy's doctor wife, Aranka, hustled him off to the Stockholm clinic of Dr. Herbert Olivecrona, a disciple of Yale's famed Neurologist Harvey Gushing. Since surgeons usually use local anesthetics for brain operations (ether may congest brain blood vessels), Poet Karinthy remained acutely aware of everything that happened to him. Last year, he published the first patient's-eye-view account of a brain operation in medical history. This week the English translation of Karinthy's remarkable book appeared...
...There was a sudden jerk as if he [Dr. Olivecrona] had seized the opening with a pair of forceps. It was followed by a straining sensation, a feeling of pressure, a cracking sound, and a terrific wrench. . . . Something broke with a dull noise. . . . Each cracking sound reminded me of taking the lid off a jamjar, while the process as a whole was like splitting open a wooden packing case, plank by plank...
Three hours after the operation began, when Dr. Olivecrona was delicately prying out the red tumor from the flaccid tissue of Karinthy's cerebellum, the poet lost consciousness. Three weeks later, after an uneventful convalescence, happy Poet Karinthy went back to his Budapest cafés, heard no more nonexistent locomotives. But two-and-a-half years after his ordeal he died of a heart attack...
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