Medicine: The Spoon & the Cord

The 19-year-old boy who was rolled into the operating room of St. Margaret’s Hospital in Spring Valley, Ill. had no history of heart trouble, so Surgeon Russell Simonetta confidently ordered an anesthetic : cyclopropane, after an intravenous injection of thiopental sodium. Within two hours, Dr. Simonetta, assisted by Dr. Henry Jacobs, had completed his surgery: cleaning and setting an elbow fractured when the patient was pinned under a tractor. Then, as he was about to be wheeled out, the boy’s heart stopped.

What happened next was one more striking example of how a cool, quickwitted doctor can often cheat death with only the most rudimentary tools. The surgeon quickly sliced open the chest cavity to massage the heart, but it went into ventricular fibrillation, a useless twitching that is fatal unless the heart is shocked back into a normal beat. An electric defibrillator was needed. St. Margaret’s had none, but Dr. Jacobs knew what to do.

While Surgeon Simonetta massaged the heart, Jacobs ripped the cord from an electric fan in the operating room, ordered a silver-plated spoon from a room where the nurses took their coffee breaks. “I bared the wires,” he said, “and wrapped one around the spoon and placed it against the heart. I wrapped the other around a retractor and placed it against the shoulder. A third fellow plugged the wire in.” After four jolts of current, the fluttering heart was calm; 15 minutes after its own last beat, normal pumping was resumed.

Last week, with the patient making a normal recovery, the citizens of Spring Valley (pop. 5,000) found a way to show Dr. Jacobs their gratitude. They chipped in to help buy the hospital a $350 defibrillator so that other patients’ lives would not have to depend on an electric cord, a coffee spoon.