Word: mitral
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...toughness of the human heart and its ability to withstand intrusion had made a deep impression on Brigham Surgeon Dwight Harken during World War II, when he removed shell fragments from servicemen's hearts. His main postwar concern has been with heart valves, especially mitral valves that have been damaged by rheumatic fever. In 1948, he was one of a few bold surgeons who first dared to slip a finger, with a tiny surgical knife at the tip, into a beating heart to separate the leaflets of a mitral valve partly closed by scarring...
...some mitral and aortic valves are so badly damaged and distorted that they are beyond repair. If he could take a piece of metal out of the heart, Harken wondered, why couldn't he put one in? Then he could replace an irreparable valve. When heart-lung machines were perfected, the way was opened for valve replacement. By now. Dr. Harken has implanted 47 heart valve replacements and many hundreds of similar heart valve operations have been done across the U.S. Human Substitute. Aside from Dr. Harken's work, most of the pioneering in heart surgery has been...
...section of the gum, without undue bleeding. Surgeons in other fields have found that it is safer to keep a patient on anticoagulants even for such radical operations as amputating a limb, removing a lobe of a lung, or working inside the heart itself to free a hardened mitral valve. In most of the Behrman-Wright cases, the patients took their anticoagulants (usually drugs of the coumarin family) without a break, even on the day of operation...
...rays located the bullet - in Bruce's left knee. Evidently the bullet had hit a rib, lost its momentum, entered the pulmonary vein carrying oxygenated blood from the lungs to the heart's upper left chamber. Car ried along with the blood, the slug went through the mitral valve into the left ventricle and up through the aortic valve. It turned downward at the aorta's arch in the upper chest, and traveled through the femoral artery until this became too nar row. Then the bullet stopped behind the left knee. Surgeons had no difficulty removing...
...improvements in technique which made brain surgery a lifesaving, everyday procedure. Working side by side with Gushing was a radiologist. Dr. Merrill Sosman, who pioneered X-ray treatment for pituitary tumors. In 1920 Surgeon Elliott Cutler made a daring attempt at surgery inside the heart, to correct a narrowed mitral valve; it was crude and premature (all but one patient died), but it helped pave the way for one of his pupils, Dwight Emary Harken. In 1948 Dr. Harken was one of three surgeons who, independently and almost simultaneously, began to operate with increasing success and decreasing risk to widen...