Word: surgeon
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Twenty-five years ago on Nov. 15, Baby Fae's world-famous heart stopped beating. But the medical implications of her short life, said her surgeon, Dr. Leonard Bailey of California's Loma Linda University Medical Center, were just beginning. On Oct. 26, 1984, Bailey had stitched a walnut-sized baboon heart into Stephanie Fae Beauclair's tiny chest, making her the first infant to receive a cross-species heart transplant. Amid protests from animal-rights activists, Americans hung on every thump of her simian heart for three short weeks. When her weakened body went into kidney failure and finally...
...seat of the soul, an agent too delicate to meddle with. After a few incremental advances, that changed on a wide scale with World War II, when massive carnage forced military doctors to experiment with anesthesia and the other elements of modern surgery. Dr. Dwight Harken, a young Army surgeon, managed to remove shrapnel and bullets from some 130 soldiers' chests without killing one. Buoyed by such successes, in the postwar years surgeons made rapid advances in heart treatments. But they struggled to perform operations that lasted longer than four minutes, because the interruption in circulation caused brain damage. That...
...maxillofacial surgeon, Jerome Sobel has brought a smile - literally - to hundreds of patients' faces. But the Lausanne physician has a second job that is far more somber: helping terminally ill people end their lives. Sobel is president for French-speaking Switzerland's chapter of EXIT, an assisted-suicide organization that provides a lethal dose of barbiturates to terminally ill patients who want to end their life. (See pictures of suicide in the U.S. Army recruiters' ranks...
...much higher [in these babies]. The stress response to the pain of the surgery proved dangerous," Wilder explains. It is also important to remember how primitive surgical painkilling mechanisms were before the invention of ether, Wilder adds. According to the medical historian Paul Strathern, for example, the greatest French surgeon of the early 19th century, Guillaume Dupuytren, once reported that the best method he had discovered for anesthetizing his female patients was to make a "brutal remark" and hope they fell into a faint...
Overhauling fee-for-service may well make medicine less lucrative for some practitioners. But it would give others a new opportunity to practice medicine in an almost forgotten way: getting to know their patients and keeping them healthy so they can avoid a surgeon or a hospital. "It's a chance for a primary-care doctor to be a hero again," says Dr. Thomas Graf, chairman of Geisinger's community-practice team. That's not the stuff of AA bond ratings or billion-dollar revenue streams, but it just might be worth more than both...