Word: fever
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Maine's G.O.P. Senator Owen Brewster, visiting Detroit, caught the fever. He announced that Vandenberg was growing daily as a dark horse, even predicted that Vandenberg would lead popular polls "in a few weeks." He added flatly: "Vandenberg...
When Dr. Horace Smithy, crack young (34) surgeon of the Medical College of South Carolina, first examined his patient, he thought her trip to Charleston had been in vain. Blonde Betty Lee Woolridge was an almost classic example of the wreckage caused when a heart is crippled by rheumatic fever. At 21, Betty Lee weighed only 85 pounds; veins in her neck stood out like whipcords; her abdomen was swollen with a fluid by-product of congestive heart failure. Doctors in her home town of Canton, Ohio had told her she had only a year to live...
...Technique. First Dr. Smithy designed a new valvulotome, an instrument for cutting valves. Essentially, it is a tube containing a small lancet with a special biting end ; with it he hoped to cut out the scar tissue that forms on the heart valves of many rheumatic fever victims, and blocks their action. Then he developed a way of using procaine (local anesthetic common in dentistry) to control the violent, often fatal spasms that usually plague surgeons who have the courage to operate on the heart. Dr. Smithy was ready for his first operation on a human being when Betty...
...Smithy's operation on Betty Lee was daring. Surgical annals record only twelve operations on the heart's valves; only two patients lived. Since 1928, no other such operations have been recorded. The type of heart damage Betty Lee suffered is the most common resulting from rheumatic fever, which causes 90% of all heart disease in children, 40% of heart disease at all ages...
...only Dr. Smithy has tried the operation. Some day, some other surgeon, who will need long laboratory training, might operate on Dr. Smithy himself, whose own heart was damaged in childhood by rheumatic fever...