REMOVAL OF LUNGS

Taranaki Daily News, 22 June 1935, Page 14 (Supplement)

REMOVAL OF LUNGS

GREAT ADVANCE IN SURGERY, NEW RESISTERS OF DISEASE. Twenty entire lungs, either right or left, have been successfully removed at Philadelphia, in the four years since the first operations of this kind were made, states a report prepared by Dr. Richard. H. Meade junr., of. Philadelphia, which was printed in a recent edition of the Montreal Daily Star. Surgeons were now performing successfully operations on the chest for grave conditions which a few years ago were .considered impossible, he .said. Among those previously considered inoperable were lung tumors, and other tumors in the chest and hernia of the diaphragm,. which led to “upside-down stomachs.” Operations were also done on adhesions of membranes of the heart which interfered with its proper beating. Mortality • for removing lung tumor, he said, had decreased from 40 per cent, to 17.7 per cent, during the last ten years. Dr. Meade attributed the advances to improved surgical technique rising from a better knowledge of the chest.

Concentrated in the bodies of human mothers, a new store of remedies against some of the major diseases has been discovered at Harvard University, states Dr. Charles F. McKhann, professor of pediatrics and communicable diseases at the university, in the same article. These remedies came from substances evidently concentrated by the mother’s body as a protection for her child, he said, and included protectives for measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria and infantile paralysis. These substances were called antibodies, the name given by the medical profession to a great number of chemicals of unusual nature which living bodies form for'their own protection against disease. Dr. McKhann said the anti-bodies found so concentrated in the mother probably had their source in her own exposure at Some time in her life to the ills for which they were the protection. They were extracted from the placenta. Other physicians said it was astonishing that the medical records did not indicate much, if any, research previously in the human source for potent resisters to disease. In the animal kingdom, the use of the placenta was virtually universal. Dr. McKhann said that the measles extract had been given to 258 persons exposed to this malady and that it “proved highly effective in preventing the disease, or else was followed by a much milder form of measles.”. Some mild, unpleasant reactions had been found in the extract, but it was believed that they would be eliminated by ■ improved methods -of preparation.