Word: plastic
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...blind side-his Borgia-minded dinner guests, for instance, might easily drop some poison in his soup. So he had a surgeon cut a notch in his nose for good peripheral vision. This incident is used by Sir Harold Delf Gillies, Britain's famed and famously light-hearted plastic surgeon, to illustrate the infinite challenges to the imagination that are found in his difficult surgical specialty. A massive new study now tells how Sir Harold and his colleagues treat human flesh as if it were sculptor's clay and reports on the latest heroic operations which restore mutilated...
...Plastic Lung. To the surgeon the heart is the center of a familiar but complex machine (see diagram). Used blood, from which all the body's tissues have removed nourishing oxygen, returns through the two great veins (superior and inferior vena cava) to the right upper chamber (auricle). It empties from there through the tricuspid valve into the right ventricle. This muscular chamber contracts and pushes the blood through the pulmonary valve and pulmonary artery to the lungs to pick up fresh oxygen. Reddened blood returns to the left auricle, passes through the mitral valve into the left ventricle...
...blood as he made two circular (purse-string) sutures. "Suction." An assistant dipped a glass-tipped rubber tube, attached to a vacuum pump, into the heart bed, drew out the spilled blood. With fine team coordination, Bailey made a small cut in the auricle wall; one assistant slid a plastic tube through it into the lower great vein, and another drew the purse string tight to check bleeding. Another cut, another tube, for the upper great vein. A third tube, through the side of the subclavian artery into the aorta...
...general practitioner from Anoka, Minn., went to work with Lillehei. Neophyte DeWall figured: Instead of dreading bubbles, why not put them to use? After all, the blood could be made to "film" around bubbles. He took the revolutionary step of pumping the patient's blood into a plastic cylinder and deliberately bubbling, almost foaming it, with a stream of oxygen. Then, to get rid of excess bubbles, he let the blood settle slowly in a slightly inclined cylinder and a helical reservoir, both coated on the inside with an antifoaming compound long used by brewers. The DeWall oxygenator, coupled...
...Leaky valves, particularly the aortic. At Georgetown University Hospital, Surgeon Charles Anthony Hufnagel has developed an ingenious solution: into the aortic channel he introduces an additional valve made of plastic, with a floating ball which stops the backflow when the heart relaxes. (Such valves used to tick like a clock inside the patient, are now silent because the ball is covered with silicone rubber.) The gadget does not prevent all backflow but stops enough to keep most patients' hearts from being overloaded...