Word: oxygenate
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...best of operating rooms and often with patients who seem to be the best surgical risks, the heart stops or flutters uselessly. Since there is no way of foretelling such catastrophes, said Dr. Julian Johnson of Philadelphia's University Hospital, every operating theater should have emergency equipment; oxygen, an electric "defibrillator" to shock the heart back into action (TIME, Feb. n, 1952), and the right surgical instruments for opening the patient's chest...
...developments in surgery have had such public appeal as the "blue-baby" operation, first performed at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1944. Children born with malformed hearts look blue because their blood does not get enough oxygen. They cannot romp like normal youngsters; many of them cannot even walk across a room without huffing and puffing, and have to spend their waking hours in wheelchairs...
...Helen Taussig and Surgeon Alfred Blalock (after years of experiments on animals) worked out a solution to the blue-baby problem, their proposal looked daring indeed: to revamp the arteries close to the heart so that more blood is pumped to the lungs to get its full quota of oxygen. It worked. Within a year, 80 of the blue boys and blue girls operated on at Johns Hopkins went home a healthy pink, and were soon able to run and play as if nothing had ailed them. The children thus saved from crippling and early death now number thousands...
Many scientists think that life appeared on earth when the atmosphere, instead of being its present mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide, contained methena, ammonia and hydrogen. These ingredients, still to be found in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn, slowly combined into larger and larger organic (carbon-containing) molecules, according to the hypothesis. At last one molecule, a complex protein, showed the ability to absorb other molecules and create replicas of itself out of their material. This "Adam molecule" was the first life; it could grow and reproduce itself...
...anesthetized and Dr. Gibbon, with two assisting surgeons, laid bare her heart. They opened the two large veins carrying blood to it, and slipped in plastic tubes which drained the blood away to the artificial heart-lung. There, one pump drew in the blood. Another speeded it to an oxygen chamber, where it flowed over a set of metal grids like the plates in a storage battery. Electronic controls kept the flow rate just right, made sure that oxygen was added and carbon dioxide taken away. in exact amounts, and even kept the blood at the proper degree of acidity...