Autotransfusion

The skinny, scrappy son of a Pittsburgh butcher chested up to another boy in a squabble over small change. The other boy placed the tip of a slim butcher knife to the pugnacious one's left breast, asked, "How'd you like to be stabbed," pushed hard. Unaware of the stabbing, the butcher's son walked ten paces before he collapsed from a perforation of his heart.

At Pittsburgh's Presbyterian Hospital Surgeon Charles M. Watson and his surgeon-son, James Rose Watson, swiftly ripped the left side of the butcher boy's chest open. Inside they could see blood pouring from the punctured heart into the pleural cavity wherein the left lung lay deflated.

Surgeons Watson recalled that on rare occasions when a parturient woman was bleeding to death from a Caesarean section, her life had been saved by transfusion with blood drained from her abdomen. With the idea of trying to do the same with the wounded butcher boy, the surgeons sopped wads of cheesecloth into the bloody hollow of his chest, wrung them out in a glass pitcher. Thus they quickly recovered almost a quart of blood.

Removal of the puddle of blood also served to let them see the wounded heart and to close its gap with five swift stitches. They then stitched the door of his chest shut.

While this was going on, assistants poured the pitcher of blood through a filter made of several layers of gauze. By the time that a tumblerful of his own blood had been pumped back into his body, the boy recovered consciousness.

After some ups & downs the youngster fully recovered, enabling Father Watson, 60, and Son Watson, 32, to write a joint report which the Journal of the American Medical Association published last week. One point the Watsons wanted emphasized: "As far as we can determine . . . this is the first time autotransfusion has been used in the treatment of this type of injury."

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