Word: pneumonia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Eighteen days after Louis Washkansky received history's first transplant of a human heart, the Cape Town grocer died of double pneumonia. The underlying cause of the process that ended in death was clouded and likely to become the subject of medical dispute, but one thing was clear: it was not the failure of the transplanted heart. To the last, that organ functioned with a surprisingly strong and regular beat...
Then came a disturbing report. One afternoon Washkansky complained of chest pains and started running a slight fever. By morning he was coughing up sputum. Doctors diagnosed it as pneumonia, in the next 24 hours gave him 20 million units of penicillin...
...honorary D.Sc. from Cape Town University and offhandedly reported that his arthritic hands had not bothered him at all during the five-hour operation, quickly assembled his team at Washkansky's bedside. Whether a heart-transplant patient who had diabetes and was on immunosuppressive drugs could fight off pneumonia was difficult to say. Yet at week's end the hospital still listed Washkansky's condition as "satisfactory." Said Surgeon Barnard: "It's worrying, of course. But I think we can get this infection under control...
Died. Dr. Henry B. Bigelow, 88, U.S. pioneer in oceanography; of pneumonia; in Concord, Mass. As a Harvard professor in 1930, Bigelow founded what has become one of the nation's biggest oceanographic centers, a vast complex at Woods Hole, Mass., that has charted the Gulf Stream, explained tricks of sonar to the U.S. Navy, now maps the ocean's floor and searches out ways to tap the vast underwater food potential...
...meantime let us return to considering the further consequences of treating this hopelessly unconscious man's pneumonia: If the average hospital stay is two weeks, then by occupying a bed for a year, such a patient has kept 26 others out of the hospital, others who are salvageable, as this man is not. With the present critical shortage of hospital beds, the admission of patients, even those with cancer, may be delayed for some weeks, possibly long enough for the disease to progress from the curable to the incurable state. Thus we may sacrifice those who can be saved...