Surgery: Ticker Triumphs

The heart is becoming more and more accessible to surgical repair. Along with surgical ingenuity, the devices that have made much open-heart surgery feasible are the mechanical pumps that complement the blood-circulating functions of living tissue. Last week two such machines scored dramatic advances:

> In Houston, a Mexican beautician named Mrs. Esperanza del Valle Vasquez, 37, was helped to survive ten crucial postoperative days by being hooked up to one of Dr. Michael DeBakey’s plastic “half-hearts,” developed at Baylor and Rice universities. Used mostly outside rather than partly inside the body—as in previous cases—the pump increased Mrs. Vasquez’s heart output by as much as 40% while she recuperated from deft surgical replacement of valves damaged by rheumatic fever. Two previous patients of Dr. DeBakey’s, both men in their 60s, died despite aid from the heart pump; but at week’s end the artificial half-heart was removed from the younger, stronger Mexican woman in a 20-minute operation, and her own heart beat effectively.

> Off Viet Nam on the U.S. Navy hospital ship Repose, a 16-year-old Vietnamese girl named Phan Thi Truong, a victim of rheumatic fever damage, rested easily after delicate surgery during which a new portable heart-lung machine was used for the first time.

Conventional hospital heart machines weigh as much as 1,000 lbs., but the new portable pump, developed by Baylor’s Dr. Arthur C. Beall Jr., fits into a suitcase, weighs little more than 50 lbs., and can operate on batteries. In bed, little Phan Thi Truong pointed happily to her chest, saying again and again “Numbah One”—thanks both to the surgeon’s skill and to an ingenious mechanical Numbah Two.