Daring Deed in the Heart

Imaginative and inventive surgeons have tried several ways to help the victim of a heart attack regain normal circulation, but none had ever been so bold as to cut out a piece of the heart itself. None, that is, until Dr. Raymond O. Heimbecker was confronted at To ronto General Hospital with a 56-year-old diabetic victim of a heart attack.

As the only hope of saving him, Dr. Heimbecker decided to try an unprecedented open-heart operation.

With the patient's circulatory system connected to a pump-oxygenator, the surgeon opened the heart and found that the septum (wall) between the main pumping chambers, the ventricles, was torn and consisted partly of dead tissue. A substantial part of each ventricle, to which the blood supply had been cut off by the shutdown of a coronary artery, was also dead or dying. Dr. Heimbecker repaired the septum with a Teflon patch. Then, as the dying muscle in the ventricle walls was interfering with the working of healthy muscle, he boldly decided to cut it out. He removed two pieces, each 3 in. by 2 in., one from each ventricle. The surgeon put nothing in their place, but closed the heart by stitching together the muscle from opposite sides of the holes.

The patient's heart performed fairly well, Medical World News reports; its bouts of irregular activity were checked by drugs and electrical stimulation. But the patient's lung damage had necessitated cutting a breathing tube into his windpipe, and after a month he died from an unforeseeable rupture where this tube had been placed.

Clearly, despite hundreds of earlier tests on dogs, such daring surgical deeds are for use in only the direst cases, but Dr. Heimbecker expects to see more of them and to repeat his bold procedure.

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