Word: ultrasounds
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...Ultrasound, as the practitioners of a new and arcane art call it, refers to vibrations above the limit of human hearing (about 20,000 cycles per second*) In industry ultrasound waves are used to precipitate carbon and sulphur from chimney exhausts, abating the smoke nuisance and recapturing useful materials, and for testing big metal components such as locomotive axles for flaws. In dentistry there is the ultrasonic drill. In medicine a few enthusiasts have reported good results with ultrasound in arthritis, neuritis, muscle spasm and athletic injuries. It will break up gallstones or kidney stones in an animal...
Sharper Than a Knife. Nobody knows how ultrasound achieves most of its effects. But its use in neurology at Iowa City has a solid base in years of painstaking research. Physicist William Justin Fry, 39, worked with underwater sound for the Navy during World War II, went to the University of Illinois at Urbana and carried on ultrasound work with funds from the Office of Naval Research. In the early postwar years most ultrasound generators produced only a crude, unfocused beam. Fry built a two-story laboratory with equipment reminiscent of science-fiction illustrations, gradually refined his complex apparatus...
...each side) called the ansa lenticularis. But he found conventional surgery too crude and damaging: it meant putting a knife through healthy tissues to get at the almost inaccessible ansa lenticularis. He saw the same objections to alcohol injections (TIME, March 21, 1955). Dr. Meyers believed that ultrasound might prove sharper and more precise than any scalpel, worked with Fry in designing and building a treatment room for Iowa City...
...operation, each patient got only a local anesthetic, an injection of procaine hydrochloride into the scalp. Then, with a drill and saw, Dr. Meyers removed a piece of the skull, four by five inches. Ultrasound cannot be transmitted through bone because on meeting such resistance it generates too much heat. With the skull flap out of the way, the surgeons made a shallow pan in its place, using a metal strip as border and the dura mater (the brain's parchment-like covering) as the bottom. This they filled with salt solution from which all gas had been removed...