Word: transplanter
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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...
Chief Surgeon Christiaan N. Barnard, who earlier in the week accepted an 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...
...proposed recipient of the heart. Obviously he is close to death, or such drastic surgery would not be contemplated. Yet his own heart must be cut out, which is tantamount to killing him, while he still retains vitality enough to withstand the most Draconian of operations. If the transplant should fail, he will certainly die. Thus the surgeons will, in effect, have killed him (as they might in any major operation), no matter how lofty their motive in trying to prolong his life and make it more satisfying...
...both sides of the surgeon's dilemma. At the University of Mississippi Medical Center, Dr. James D. Hardy had, on three occasions, a patient dying of brain injuries who would have been a suitable donor-but he had no recipient. Twice, when he had potential recipients of a transplant, he had no human donors. One candidate to receive a transplant, who seemed to be dying after a heart attack, bewildered the surgeons by getting well enough to go home. When the other was undeniably dying from progressive failure of his heart, Dr. Hardy gave him a chimpanzee...
...little help, surgeons have been forced back on human sources. Here, Stanford University's Dr. Norman E. Shumway could offer reassurance from many years of experimental surgery on dogs. A nagging question had been: What about the heart's nerve connections, since these cannot be reestablished in transplant surgery? Dr. Shumway's answer: It doesn't matter. Like practically everything else in nature, the heart has fail-safe protection. It has an internal, independent, electrical "ignition systern" to trigger its beats. This system speeds up in response to outside nervous stimulation (excitement) to meet the body...