Life from Death

It was 3 o'clock one morning last week when a car carrying four bluejackets plunged over an embankment and hit a tree in Arlington, Va. Two of the sailors were scarcely hurt, but two died with broken necks.

At 7 a.m. word of the deaths was passed to the "decedent affairs desk" at the U.S. Naval Hospital at Bethesda. Md.. which in turn called Commander George W. Hyatt, director of the hospital's tissue bank. Dr. Hyatt, an orthopedic surgeon, seized the chance to turn a loss of life into a lifesaving procedure. He arranged for the bodies to be moved 20 miles to the hospital's morgue, then turned to "the toughest part of my job": telephoning the two families to notify them of the deaths. Dr. Hyatt waited an hour or so for the first shock to wear off, then called back: Would the families consent to having parts of the sailors' bodies taken for the hospital's tissue bank? Both agreed.

The scrubdown in the tissue bank's underground operating room was even more thorough than is needed for live surgery, for contamination of tissue can make the bank's operations worse than useless. At 2:05 p.m., Dr. Hyatt, two assistant surgeons, a nurse and five specially trained medical corpsmen began excision of parts of the first body. The surgeons removed long sections of both ascending and descending aorta. With a dermatome they took skin, only 15/1,000 of an inch thick, from the trunk and legs. Next came fascia (connective tissue) from the thighs. They also took pelvic bone. Each item was measured, labeled and prepared for storage. At 3:30 a.m. the operations ended, and the tissue bank's doors--imprinted with the proud legend Ex Morte Vita (Life from Death)--were shut.

Infinite pains had been taken to leave no conspicuous marks on the sailors' bodies (no skin is ever taken from the face or neck). The bodies were shipped back to home-town undertakers.

Material from the two bodies, says Dr. Hyatt, will help about 75 patients in need of grafts to replace or support their own tissues during the body's self-repair process. While the new material was being freeze-dried (by a half-dozen methods), an attendant made fresh entries on a wall board in Dr. Hyatt's office, to expand the bank's current inventory to: 33 cortical strips, eight infant long bones, four straight pieces of chest artery, 39,354 sq. cm. of skin. The tissue bank will not take material from victims of infectious disease or cancer, has to rely mainly on victims of heart attacks and accidents. In five years it has taken material from 104 individuals, benefited about 1,000 patients of 150 military and civilian surgeons across the U.S.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.