Word: skulls
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...year-old baker in the University of California hospital in San Francisco was dying of a tumor at the base of his brain. The swelling growth was pressing on the basilar artery, one of the brain's major blood suppliers, and eight of the main nerves in his skull were being compressed into uselessness. The patient's speech was garbled and slurred, he regurgitated much of the little he could eat, he had double vision, part of the right side of his body was paralyzed, and he suffered from fits of uncontrollable, inappropriate laughter...
...tragedy was compounded by the fact that once X rays and arteriograms had confirmed their diagnosis, the doctors were stumped. Bold brain surgeons have been probing and cutting deeper and deeper inside the human skull, but the floor of the brain box, where the patient's tumor was growing, has remained virtually inviolate. Nerves, arteries and other vital parts of the anatomy are all crammed into that small central sanctuary behind the nose and mouth. There they rise through openings in the floor of the skull and reach toward the brain above (see diagram). So complex is the collection...
Window in a Pivot. Then his case came to the attention of the neurosurgery department at the University of California Medical Center. There, like so many neurosurgeons before him, Dr. George C. Stevenson had been challenged by that seemingly impregnable floor of the skull. While studying blood flow in the brains of monkeys, he had learned how to slice through the anatomical maze at the brain's base with the aid of a binocular surgical microscope, and he had practiced putting tourniquets on the basilar artery...
...operation on 33 cadavers. They found that while nerves, blood vessels and other soft structures were difficult enough to cut through, the worst obstacle was an important but little-known bone, the clivus, which balances on the very top of the spinal column to form a pivot for the skull. There was only one way to get past the clivus, and that was to cut a window in it. To make this possible, a whole trayful of special instruments had to be designed and built. Those instruments were ready when the young baker was admitted to the U.C. hospital...
...been a relatively rare cancer, but the operation is expected to be equally effective for more common tumors. Even some noncancerous conditions, including strokes caused by the bursting of a brain artery on the floor of the skull, now seem susceptible to surgical therapy. Even as Dr. Stevenson was reporting this week to the Harvey Gushing Neurosurgical Society in Manhattan, surgical teams from two other medical centers described their own successes with similar operations...