Medicine: Sawbones Get Together

At Detroit’s Mt. Carmel Hospital, surgeons crowded around operating tables for the show. One of them deftly slit open a patient’s abdomen and explored the cavity. In an outburst of surgeon’s humor, a colleague boomed: “Now watch him botch it; never fails to mess it up when he tries to show off.” (But the operation, a clinic demonstration, was a success.) Amid such scenes, sawbones of 16 nations got together last week for their first international meeting since before the war.

The 1,000 members of the International College of Surgeons assured each other that surgery had made great strides since they had last met. Highlights:

Heart Squeeze. A fascinating operation was described by London’s Surgeon Hamilton Bailey. He reported that by massaging the heart with his bare hands he had restored to life patients who had seemingly died on the operating table. Mr. Bailey* is one of the first surgeons to resort to this operation systematically.

About one surgery patient in a thousand dies under anesthetic. The usual emergency treatment, when a patient’s heart stops, is artificial respiration and an adrenalin injection into the heart. Mr. Bailey said he had abandoned this uncertain, time-consuming method for more direct action. He cuts open the abdomen below the ribs with a sweep of the knife, grasps the exposed heart with his right hand and squeezes it like a bulb. After a few minutes’ massage, Mr. Bailey triumphantly reported, some of his patients’ hearts began to beat of their own accord, and the patients recovered. Other surgeons have had similarly successful results.

Surgery of Repair. For a badly smashed leg, amputation used to be the regular thing. But Chicago’s Surgeon John F. Pick reported that during World War II “an extraordinary number of legs were saved” by plastic surgery. At eight U.S. Army plastic surgery centers, surgeons used new grafting methods (given names like “pincushion flap,” “bridge flap”) to clothe blasted legs with new flesh, and reduced amputations almost to nil. Said Surgeon Pick: “We are in a great transition from the surgery of despair to the surgery of repair.”

Pain Killers. There was more hope for victims of the excruciating pain resulting from angina pectoris and some types of cancer. St. Louis’ Surgeon Roland M. Klemme reported a new technique of cutting certain sympathetic nerves in the chest, which stops angina pain without harmful effects; Chicago’s Surgeon Jacob P. Greenhill said that a similar operation on abdominal sympathetic nerves often gives permanent relief from pain in cancer of the uterus and other pelvic organs. Also effective: an alcohol injection in the spine.

*British surgeons are invariably called “Mr.”