Voyage to Boston

"A blow on the nose to British surgery," harrumphed an anonymous British doctor, quoted in London's Sunday Express, when Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden's physicians announced that their distinguished patient would fly to Boston to be operated on by the Lahey Clinic's Dr. Richard Cattell. Actually, the decision represented no skin off anybody's nose. With an admirable lack of professional jealousy, Eden's British doctors recognized that the Foreign Secretary, still ailing after two operations in London, needed a specialized skill which Dr. Cattell had developed as highly as any surgeon in the world. And the best place for Dr. Cattell to operate was on his home ground.

At the start, Anthony Eden's trouble seemed simple enough. He had stones in the gall bladder. This organ does nothing but store up the liver's output of bile at times when the bile is not needed for digestion, and the human body can get along fine without it. So on April 12, Surgeon Basil Hume of St. Bartholomew's Hospital cut out Eden's gall bladder. After the operation, the common bile duct, the tube which carries bile to the digestive tract, was partly obstructed. It may have been damaged during surgery. This would be no reflection on Surgeon Hume, for part of the operation has to be done "blind" under inches of body tissues. The duct may have been misshapen to begin with, or the trouble may have developed during healing.

More surgery on the 56-year-old patient was called for. Bile kept backing up into his bloodstream and caused jaundice. So Surgeon Hume had to operate on his patient again on April 29 to do a patching job. However, as happens about once in every four such cases, the patching operation also failed. Unless his bile duct could be completely repaired, Anthony Eden would be doomed to chronic invalidism.

By happy chance, the Lahey Clinic's Dr. Cattell was lecturing in London when Eden's doctors faced their dilemma. He has specialized in repairing troublesome bile ducts. Dr. Cattell examined Eden and accepted the British invitation to do a third operation. But, he explained, it would be far better for him to do it in his own theater with a staff of anesthetists and nurses who work smoothly with him after years of practice.

Eden was adjudged fit to fly, and last week he landed at Boston in a special Canadian government plane. By the Britons' own estimates, Eden would have had only a 50-50 chance of full recovery from this third operation if even the best British surgeon had done it, but at Dr. Cattell's more practiced hands his chance was rated at 70-30.

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