Big Advances Expected In Heart Surgery

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30793, 3 July 1965, Page 16

Big Advances Expected In Heart Surgery

"The Press" Special Service

WELLINGTON, July 2.

Spectacular advances in vascular and heart surgery would be made in the next few years, an eminent Napier-born American doctor said in Wellington.

Dr. Harley B. Alexander, one of the most highly-qualified surgeons in America, is on ' a three-week visit to New Zealand with his wife and three chil. dren. He predicted that advances would be made in vascular fields with the correction surgically of the blood flow in diseased vessels so that tissues could live and function within normal limits. The replacement of a degenerative circulation, including the removal and replacement of coronary vessels and cerebral clots, was being carried out with limited success at present. "There have been too many failures to date,” he said. One of the most fertile areas of research seemed to be in the prevention of the generative process.

The theory that an intake of fatty food caused arterio-

sclerosis had recently been revived, he said. Much more research had to be done. Dr. Alexander was educated at the Napier Boys’ High School. He graduated from Otago University in 1936 at the top of his class.

He won a medical travelling scholarship, and the senior clinical medals in medicine and surgery. To Mayo Clinic After a year as house surgeon at Wellington Hospital: he went to the celebrated Mayo Clinic at Rochester. Minnesota. He stayed there for six [years till 1943 when he was i assigned to a base hospital for [United States forces in Cali- | fornia. i During his time with the Mayo Clinic Dr. Alexander I took an M.D., and M.S., and [then a PH.D. in surgery at [the University of Minnesota. He also passed the American Board of Surgery examination (equivalent to the F.R.C.S.) and was appointed

to the permanent staff of the clinic as a surgeon. After his war-time service. Dr. Alexander resigned his post in Rochester to go into practice in Los Angeles. He has been senior surgeon to Santo Monica and St. John’s Hospitals, and also at the Memorial Hospital, Culver City, in Los Angeles. The New Zealand pioneer method of blood transfusions for unborn children had created a stir in the medical world, he said. The operations performed recently in New Zealand were regarded as a great feat.