Word: pericardium
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...members of a surgical team took their places around the operating table. With confidence born of experience, the surgeons made a vertical incision from the patient's collarbone to his diaphragm, sawed through his breastbone and then, using a framelike mechanism, spread the rib cage and exposed the pericardium, or heart...
...Donald Effler, tall, athletic and at 55 one of the country's leading heart surgeons, strode into the operating room. Taking his place among his subordinates, he slit open the pericardium and examined the heart. Another surgeon, meanwhile, opened the patient's thigh and removed a foot-long section of the saphenous vein, one of four major veins that carry blood from the lower limbs to the heart. Effler began rapping out commands like a drill sergeant, initiating the procedure to shut down the patient's heart and turn its functions over to a heart-lung machine...