Word: spinal
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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Doctors who use spinal anesthesia freely got a sharp warning last week from Manhattan's famed Neurologist Foster Kennedy. Reporting, with two colleagues, on cases seen recently at Bellevue Hospital, Dr. Kennedy described several kinds of paralysis resulting from damage to the spinal cord during anesthesia...
Often, the doctors contended in Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics, the damage appears long after the operation, so it is not traced to its cause and seldom gets into the statistics of spinal anesthesia's harmful side effects...
Concluded Dr. Kennedy and colleagues: "Spinal anesthesia is accompanied by many definite and terrible dangers which are far too little appreciated by surgeons and anesthetists. From a neurological point of view, we give the opinion that spinal anesthesia should be rigidly reserved for those patients unable to accept a local or general anesthetic. Paralysis below the waist is too large a price for a patient to pay in order that the surgeon should have a fine relaxed field of operation...
...virus of poliomyelitis, one of the smallest disease-causing organisms, is less than a millionth of an inch long. Trying to follow this minute invader as it attacks the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord has long been a baffling problem for polio researchers. Last week two Yalemen, Drs. Joseph L. Melnick and John B. LeRoy, told how they had used the electron microscope to study this microcosmic warfare-with surprising results...
...years went by there was nothing more that anyone could do. Polio would still not release him from its deadly grip. A spinal curvature developed and gradually worsened. The ravages of kidney stones sapped his disease-ridden body. His strength was almost gone. Last week, after Birdsall Sweet, 32, was finally released from 18 years and seven months in his iron lung, Dr. Smith performed his last, sad service. On the death certificate he wrote: "Acute nephritis due to chronic kidney stones due to poliomyelitis...