Word: scalpeled
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...People think of surgery," writes the author, "as a grim, tense business with the surgeon snapping 'Scalpel!' and 'Clamp!' and everything going along in dramatic silence except for the click, click of instruments. This is just a lot of hogwash. About half the time the surgeon is telling dirty jokes with the fixed intent of embarrassing the scrub nurse. The rest of the time there is bickering, or gossip, or talk about how things were last winter in Palm Springs, or how many suction cups on a squid's tentacles, or whether a woman...
...work indefinitely, but when they cut into the patient's heart sac to put an electrode in the heart muscle, the external pacemaker went wild, and the heart twitched ineffectively. The doctors traced the trouble to high-frequency interference from the diathermy machine that powered the electric scalpel they were using. This man and another who had a similar experience both recovered, but the surgeons were puzzled and worried, so they did a lot of experiments with animals...
...DeBakey speaks with singular authority. Since 1948, the dexterous scalpel and deft needle of Baylor University's professor of surgery have operated on more than 10,000 human hearts and arteries. From the far corners of the earth the great and the humble have traveled to Texas to have Surgeon DeBakey patch up their arteries with Dacron or implant artificial valves of plastic and sophisticated alloys in their hearts...
After the staggering schedule of operations, the afternoons are for staff conferences, with internists, cardiologists, radiologists and his chief assistants. Many an oldtime surgeon thought his job was done when he had laid down the scalpel and the last suture was in place. Not DeBakey. He belongs to the latter-day school typified by Harvard's Dr. Francis D. Moore (TIME cover, May 3, 1963), which insists that no less important than the operation itself are the study and preparation of the patient beforehand, and his care and study while he is recovering. DeBakey interrupts pre-operation conferences...
Called cryosurgery, from the Greek kryos (cold or frost), the new method actually involves neither ice nor scalpel. The surgeon inserts a thin cannula (tube) that kills offending tissue with liquid nitrogen's intense cold (- 196° C., or 321° below zero F.). Usually no tissue is actually removed, and the body's natural clean-up system removes the debris. Virtually bloodless and almost painless, cryosurgery can be done on patients who remain fully conscious or only lightly anesthetized. In some cases cryosurgery is used only to relieve symptoms, but in others it achieves actual cures. Among...