RARE OPERATION

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 September 1938, Page 4

RARE OPERATION

CASING OF LIME REMOVED FROM HEART REMARKABLE SURGICAL SKILL SHOWN (By Telegraph—Press Association.) AUCKLAND, September 2. After gambling his life on a surgeon’s skill and winning, a young man passed through Auckland by the Monterey b'ound for his - home in Melbourne where he will recuperate from a daring and extremely rare operation performed in the United States. The operation freed his heart from a casing oT stone which had been slowly but relentlessly constricting it. The young man is Mr A. M. Watkins, aged 26, of 55 Barber’s Road, Kew, Melbourne. After many preliminary examinations, Mr Watkins was operated upon early in May by Dr Stuart W. Harrington, of the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota. The operation on the heart took two hours, while the whole operation took slightly more than four hours. For two hours the heart lay exposed, partly in and partly out of the body, while Dr Harrington chipped and cut away the rock-like substance which was choking it. So that life would not stop, the surgeon worked at the calcified pericardium of sac enclosing the heart for two or three minutes and then applied a warm cloth to the heart for an equal length of time. This procedure was followed to allow the heart to recuperate and was repeated through the 120 minutes. Each time a small part of the grey-white mass was removed. For much of the time, Dr Harrington held the pulsating organ in his hand. The calcined coating completely surround the heart and it was only by lifting it out of the chest that he could work at the under side. To allow the operation to be performed, it was necessary to cut off the tips of four of. Mr Watkins’s ribs. Between 50 and 60 small veins were cut and tied before it was completed. The heart expanded considerably in diameter immediately after it had been freed.