SURGERY MARVELS

Hokitika Guardian, 20 April 1926, Page 1

SURGERY MARVELS

OPERATIONS ON THE HEART AND BRAINSettle wonderful surgical operations have been performed during the last year, of which the “Daily News” gives one or two examples. The sight was restored to a live years’ old boy. Ihe mother dreaded the operation, hut success attended the surpeon’s efforts, and when the eye ■shades were removed from the hoy’s eyes, his first question was: “Can I see the man what’s opened my eyes?" In October a man was opetkited on hv Dr. Roberts, the chest- specialist at St. Mary’s Hospital, Roohampton, and a Turkish bullet was extracted from his left lung, where it had boon for nearly ten years. Ribs had to he removed land the lungs cut open in order to abstract the bullet.

Recently a man aged 63 bad bis left, ear torn off in a motor accident. He was taken to tbe West London Hospital, where the ear was stitched on again. It was the first erase of the kind at the hospital. An earlier operation at- the same hospital was that- in which part of a spike (weighing 41b.) was removed from between the heart, and lung of a 13-year-old boy. The spike was 91 incites long and 4} inches across at the tip, which was in the form of the Prince of Wales’ feathers. A piece of the hoy’s shirt had been forced into the wound.

One of the spear-heads penetrated the left side over the heart, pushing the heart over to the left side, hut not puncturing it. The surgeons succeeded in extracting the spear-head and disentangling the shirt from the lung. With the removal of the obstacle the heart went back to its normal position. The extraction of a - bullet from the brain was an operation successfully performed 'at Charing Cross Hospital on a man who shot himself in the Law Courts • -

‘Tt is now possible to perform operations which would have been unthinkable some years alio,” a hospital official told the “ Daily News.” “ Surgery made immense strides during the war, and operations on the vital organs are beeming increasngly succ-essful.

“ Almost - every day brings- some patient into hospital whose case would formerly have been regarded as hopeless, but whom, by the application of modern surgical methods, it is now possible to save.”