Word: hypothermia
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...technique originated this summer with Physiologist Baruch Bromberger, 40, and Dr. Paolo Caldini, 30, an Italian physician working in the U.S. on a Fulbright grant. They went to work on ventricular fibrillation, which is still a grave danger when a patient's body is cooled for heart surgery (hypothermia). The cooling itself protects the brain from lack of oxygen (anoxia), has greatly advanced modern heart surgery. But hearts cooled to an average 28° C. during hypothermia also become highly irritable; they may fibrillate and cause death...
Using an isolated dog's heart, connected to the donor dog's circulatory system, Bromberger and Caldini found that magnesium ions, released from the rest of the body during hypothermia, seemed to concentrate in the cold heart. They were then able to show that this magnesium could trigger fibrillation; a small magne sium increase caused fibrillation even at normal temperature...
...pets are still uncommon, mainly because they command such high fees. But in Pasadena, Dr. Robert H. Pudenz has successfully removed several brain tumors, both malignant and benign, from dogs and cats. A Florida vet has removed worms from a dog's pulmonary artery with the animal under hypothermia. A dog has no appendix, so is spared the need for an appendectomy, but he has a human-type caecum (a dead-end pouch at a turn in the intestines), which is the favorite hideaway of the whipworm. Vermifuges often cannot reach the worms there, so most vet surgeons...
...Drugs made from curare (South American arrow poison) make surgery safer by relaxing patients' muscles. Similarly, reports the National Heart Institute, a drug named strophanthidin, from an African arrow poison, has been found to reduce the danger of heart stoppage during operations under hypothermia...
Cecelia Bavolek, 18. a freshman at Pennsylvania's Wilkes College, had a hole as big as a half dollar between her auricles-a condition similar to that of Bailey's first hypothermia patient, and one that could not be corrected by his closed operation. Surgeon Gibbon and his Jefferson team piped Cecelia's blood to a "lung" made of stainless-steel screens set in an oxygen-filled chamber and pumped it back and forth for a total of 26 minutes. Cecelia Bavolek recovered quickly. It was the first time in history that man's artifice...