Human “Parts” Supplied.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLVIII, Issue 7, 14 August 1912, Page 4

Human “Parts” Supplied.

Surgeons in the United States can now order and receive within a few hours practically every part of the human body, the same to be delivered in a living and growing condition. As a housewife in New York can be supplied on demand with daily necessities, so can Amerieaii surgeons be supplied with parts o£ thtf human heart, nerves, blood-vessels, spleen, some of the smaller glands of th 4 body, the cornea cf the eye. parts of the various bones, cartilages, etc. These pe-’ markable statements were made by Dr, Alexis Carrel, of New York, who is iff charge of the research work at th 4 Rockefeller Institute, to a gathering ini Atlantic City of members of the American Sledieal Association. Dr. Carrel startled the meeting by a unique offer of supply, and went on to declare that it has become possible to make such parts live after they have been removed I'roni the body. He said he could make parts live and grow nine months after life had ceased in the human body from which they had been removed. For six year! these experiments have been going ori, and now that they have been completed and verified the world of medicine ha.| an opportunity to avail itself of the dis; eorery. Dr. Carrel began to experiment on the lower orders of animals. A piec4 of the heart of a chicken pulsated and was alive for as long as 104 d»y s after it had been removed from the fowl, anq microscopic examination revealed th® fact that connective tissue was growing from it five months after removal. Df. Carrel uses nine mediums in which to preserve the life of structures removed from the body, and he declares that b-e obtains his parts for preservation by rftmoving them from dead bodies. It is p.j*. sible,.he says, to transplant after death the tissues and organs which compose a body that has ceased to live into other identical organisms. In this transfer no death of the tissues occurs, and after they have been made part of another body life in them continues as though it had been there from birth.