Word: plastic
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...surface treatment to an entirely different end. His "Life: Elaine" is a mannered portrait of a lady with classically abstracted features and gilt collar and background. It could be a painting of the sixteenth century. But there is a stylistically twentieth century figure off to one side, and a plastic coating makes the lady gleam-perfected, distant, and ideal...
...easy. The difficulty is to secure the ball to the femur. In early operations, the shaft holding the ball was screwed into the femur. Charnley was dissatisfied with the method because the shaft sometimes came loose. A dentist friend proposed that he "cement" it in with methyl methacrylate, a plastic used for years in dentistry. "My friend couldn't have suggested anything better," says Charnley. "It was a tremendous advance. The prosthesis [artificial part] now remains permanently, rigidly fixed to the bone...
That was only half of the mechanical problem. The ball must rotate in a socket, which in most such hip operations had been made of steel. Charnley disliked the steel-to-steel joint because it must be lubricated solely by body fluids, which are often inadequate. A plastic socket would require no lubrication. But what plastic? He tried Teflon, only to have it break loose and damage nearby bone. "One day," he says, "a salesman turned up with a sample of high-density polyethylene. I sent him away, telling him that we knew that polyethylene was useless. I hadn...
Need to Shout. There remained the danger of infection, especially severe in hip surgery because so much tissue must be exposed. With Charnley's new plastic techniques, the infection rate was 4%. That was too high by his standards. Then he devised an elaborate suction system for his operating room. Each member of the surgical team was fitted with a flexible tube, long enough to permit free movement, that ran up his back and was connected to a narrow steel tube that encircled the face and had holes through which his exhaled breath was drawn away. "It makes communication...
...Angeles last month, surgeons at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital who had studied Charnley's methods demonstrated their technique in a space-age adaptation of an operating room. The entire area around the operating table was covered with a plastic "greenhouse," into which ultra-filtered air flowed from above, fast enough to change the air completely ten times a minute. Within it, three surgeons, Doctors John Toma, Charles Bechtol and Charles Hutter, were dressed in space suits with helmets, like those worn by astronauts on the moon. The scrub nurse, who handles sterile instruments, was similarly attired. Their patient was Margaret...