BACK FROM DEATH

Evening Star, Issue 21055, 18 March 1932, Page 10

BACK FROM DEATH

A SURGICAL WONDER By heart massage a Melbourne surgeon restored to life a boy whose heart had ceased to beat during an operation. It is an anxious moment in any operation when either heart or lungs cease to function. Many methods have been devised to meet the situation. In cases of extreme urgency the margin between weakness of the patient and the depressing action of the anaesthetic is so small that some such “ lasthope ” expediency has to be allowed for (says an Australian writer). The "heart is shut up in the cage of the ribs, and obviously no direct way of getting at it in the small amount of time available is practical. However, before the efficacy of massage was demonstrated, the hypodermic needle to inject adrenalin was employed. But by opening the abdomen immediately below the diaphragm (the partition" which divides the organs in the thorax from those below), the heart may be grasped and relaxed by the surgeon’s hands through the barrier. Luckily, the heart has a very strong “ local government ” of its own, governing the heart-beat. When the latter has been stopped by depressing influences reaching it by way of other nerves (these influences are due to the aiifostbetic), tbo local nerves require the merest hint, such ns a slight massage, to take up their job independently. The record time which has elapsed after the patient “dies,” when this massage was efficacious, was (in a human being) a quarter of an hour. This was in Paris in 1923.

By experiments on dogs it has boon found that the heart can bo revived half an hour after apparent death. The lower the animal the longer does the heart retain its vitality after the rest of the body ceases to function. .In frogs, the heart will beat for several days as an independent unit. Now and again, after a patient is practically dead, the heart will go on heating. The record was a London case in 1924, in which a woman who died of a “stroke” ceased breathing while the heart beat on for four and a-half hours afterwards.

Artificial respiration and oxygen were applied, but all efforts to restore breathing were fruitless. In 1929 a sensation was caused by the rumour that a Sydney specialist had invented a machine by which the heart’s action oould be revived after the patient had been dead for as long as ten minutes.

It was said to be electrical in action, and tire extension of a method by which internal muscles can be electrically stimulated. Nothing further has been beard of it, and other specialists at the time were sceptical, but if is not inherently impossible that such an imlcpendenllycontrollcd organ as the heart should bo susceptible to a strong stimulus after death.