MODERN SURGICAL MIRACLES.

Clutha Leader, Volume XXXVI, Issue 46, 19 November 1909, Page 1

MODERN SURGICAL MIRACLES.

Just where constructive surgery will stop no one, not even the most farsigntod surgeon, can ioresee. Vvitii the introduction ol the Lister methods of sterilisation of wounds, many operations became possible lvhicn beiore that era were never attempted because of tno certainty that no mutter how skilfully the surgeon applied his knife and needle, tho festering of the wound! would soon undo his work. After the surgical world had recovered from the shock of recognising the new field which antiseptics opened to them, constructive surgery, or surgery by transposition, began to be attempted, in a very modest and tentative way. When the idea of skin grafting was first suggested the older surgeons scolfed at it, on the ground that it' antiseptics strong enough to kill any germs present were usod, their strength would be sufficient to destroy the very delicate cells of the skin graft. More than this, they argued that the tiny vessels, whether carriers of blood or lymph, which supplied the nutriment to the graft, would immediately collapse when cut across, and that Lhc nourishing fluids from the part on which the graft was placed would thei'"f""> find no channels open by which t.iey could pass to the deeper tissue cells. In reply to these arguments, tho originators of the skingrafting idea said, "Theoretically it sounds absurd, but we will try." The result, as everyone now knows, was an unqualified success. Since then the extent of surface which can bo re-covered by skin-grafting is limited only hy the extent to which a patient's body can be temporarily denuded of its natural skin-coat, without musing death before the graft can be applied. A striking example of just what can be done in skin-grafting has recently beon reported by a surgeon on the statf of tho Harvard Medical School. The patient, who was terribly burned in an explosion four years ago, has been constantly undergoing skin-grafting operations at tho Massachusetts Genoral Hospital. At tho beginning of the treatment his face, neck, upper arms, and scalp were a mass of scarred tissue as a result of the healed burns. Various parts of this scarred tissue were from time to time denuded of their outer layers, and patches of skin cells from other parts or tho patient's body, and from the bodies of several of his relations, were engrafted upon tho raw spots. Thirty times the sufferer was etherised, but the result of this probable world's- record in surgical operation has made his pain and trouble worth while. Last month the patient left the hospital with a new forehead, eyelids, cheeks, nose, chin, and neck coverings, More than this, his scalp, all tho hair roots in which had been destroyed, had been replaced by scalp grafts containing living hair roots, so that now ho has what appears as a normal head of hair, though it is really made of a patchwork of bits of hairbearing skin, with which his self-sac-rificing friends and relations have supplied him. The fact that skin cells cut from one surface would continue growing when placed on another raw surface suggested to certain other daring minds that other portions of our body might stand transplanting. In an effort to prove this theory a few years ige the greater part of a pig's uppef •velid was sewn on to the. denuded edge of tho eyelid of a man who had ' (hmi seriously burnt about the eyes. Here again what was looked upon as a hopeless experiment succeeded, contrary to almost everyone's expectations, uul the eyelid grew.

A NEW VEIN'. A still more, amazing lninsix>sition of living tissues has recently been reported to have been accomplished by Prot'ossor Doyen, whose name has Income known throughout the world through his researches into tho cause and cure of cancer. I)r Doyen's patient was .differing from a waterlogged condition :>f the leg, the result of an operation in which certain of the blood channels had been interfered with to such an extent that there were not enough veins left to carry tho blood back from tho foot "upwards to the heart. Dr Doyen determined to remedy this stagnation of tho blood in tho tissues by embedding in the leg a now vein. The jugular vein in a sheep's neck was cut out, and about ten inches of it was inserted in tho patient's leg in the hope that the stagnant blood in that region would pass upwards, either through or along the sides of tho inserted vein. After tho vein was sewn into positkm the wound in tho leg was closed, and within a few hours the daring surgeon was gratified to note that tho swelling of the leg was decreasing; in other words, tho collected blood had been able to make use of the new channel to get back into tho general circulation once again. That wo shall ever reach the point where the routine treatment for kidney disease is the simple cutting out of the degenerate organ" and its replacement with a healthy one seems highly improbable, but that it is beyond the bounds of possibility one can hardly believe in view of the fact that transposition of kidneys in dogs has been already successfully accomplished. In any case, no one who has knowledge of the seemingly miraculous operations in the transposing of living tissues, which are being done to-day in the research laboratories of Germany and America, can doubt that tho extreme limits of const ruction al surgery in man have not yet been reached.