Reformátusok Lapja, 1969 (69. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1969-04-01 / 4. szám

Hearts of Iron for the Hearts of Flesh

Open-heart surgery had for many decades been only a dream for the men of the medical profession, because the most active and fickle of all human organs, the heart could not be put to rest for the duration of an operation. It is not like a limb, for instance, which can be placed in a cast and made relatively inactive for awhile. The heart must constantly function, must in every split second send that still mysterious fluid, the blood, into the remotest sections of the body, each dispatch loaded with oxygen and a host of other precious life-sustaining material.

The physicians knew for a long time if they only could arrest this delicate and complicated machine, the heart, for the time of medical interference they most assuredly could lick most of its deathly ailments. They had been hooked on the horns of this problem until men of another field came to their rescue, the mechanical engineers. These men, who are as typical of our contemporary civilization as the monks were of the

middle-ages, began designing the heart substituting machine. They met the scores of technical problems until the last “hug” was ironed out and could be put to use. Like in most machines, as long as there is a malfunctioning part, regardless how insignificant, that machine is useless.

It is at this turn of the endeavor that Pemco Inc. of Cleveland comes in, because it was precisely this Company which rolled away the last technical problems and had come out a few years back with a perfectly working heart-lung unit. Ever since, open-heart surgeries have become almost routine operations. The heart could now be taken out of business for 3-4-5 or more hours of delicate surgery! There are thousands of people all over the world today who owe their lives to this machine. And of course to the people who make it and handle it. . . The demand nowadays for this instrument is nothing short of being “global”, and they are being shipped to practically every country, while the Com-