NERVE STITCHING.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 64, Issue 32, 17 November 1943, Page 2

NERVE STITCHING.

- HAIR-FINE NEEDLES USED. MARVEL OF MODERN SURGERY. LONDON. Three "R.A.F. sergeants, two of them Spitfire pilots, are weaving a length of Hands tweed together on one loom as part of their rehabilitation work at a hospital near Manchester.

They have become firm friends while waiting for nerves, severed in air battles, to grow again, and this “combinated operation” at the loom was their own idea.

Now doctors have given them hope that by the time they have woven enough tweed for a sports coat each they may be able to rejoin their units.

Each of the pilots had the operar tion known as nerve suture, or stitching together the loose ends of a severed nerve. It is so delicate it has taken as long as seven hours.

I had to look closely to find the suturing needles on Sister’s sterilised cloth, states a “News Chronicle” reporter. They are curved, fine as hair, and about the size of the tsp of the little finger. The thread is stainless steel wire of cobweb thinness. i

When the normal architecture of the nerve is restored, the . limb is encased in plaster until new nerve fibres, the'brain messengers, begin growing and re-enervating the muscles as they grow.

Throughout the operation the nerve, which is pale-pink and varies in thickness from a pencil to a filament, is touched as rarely as possible, and held not by instruments but by loops of half-inch gauze. The progress of the nerve is tested by various means, among them the cathode-ray oscilloscope, which records the first microscopic movement.

This hospital is one of three under the Ministry of Health doing nerve suture. They are returning to active service hundreds who would othei*wise be crippled. A team of young doctors cooperates in the work. The chiefs are an orthopaedic surgeon, a neuro surgeon, and a pure research man.

Besides airmen, there are many here from the Eighth and First Armies, often facing two or even three years of nerve growth ami rehabilitation.