Posts Tagged → graft
It all started with a bang …..
I love plastic surgery, the idea of being able to fix the funny looking while lining your deep pockets with cash has always been a dream of mine (and pretty much everybody else’s). You get to do fairly interesting procedures on a regular basis and don’t ever have to tell somebody they’ll die(unless you deal with burns and skin cancers, or are a bad surgeon who happens to kill alot of people from time to time).
But it’s hard to believe that an industry which services the superficial and banal (for the most part) was forged in the embers of war* and is not as sexy as Nip/Tuck makes it out to be ……
It began in world war one when Queens Hospital, London was established (1917), it housed a 1,000 beds and was home to many of the young soldiers who were injured during the war, they would arrive there for further treatment after they had been brought back to the U.K.
Among the doctors who worked there was Sir Harold Gillies, hailing from New Zealand and formally trained as an ear,nose and throat surgeon, Gillies had decided to put his skills to the test and attempted to develop techniques for the treatment of facial injuries which had occurred as a result of war and friendly fire.
His first patient was Gunnery Sergeant Walter Yeo who had lost his eye lids in an accident with a cannon. Gillies performed what is now known as a pedicular flap where skin from a healthy part of the body is moved over to a raw area and refashioned to look as if nothing ever happened (well almost…. bear in mind this was 1917 ….. we didn’t even have brufen back then …..)
Not bad for something that was essentially beta testing on live humans.
Gillies and his colleagues went on to perform over 11,000 procedures on 5,000 men while at Queens and subsequently performed many other “firsts” including the first male to female sex change (1941) and male to female one in ’56.
Another set of flaps, the wax model (left) illustrates the graft (now called a flap I believe) that was performed (right)
The thing that strikes me the most about the history of modern plastic surgery is that none of it would have been possible given the ethical (not to mention social) dilemmas things like playing around with a live human or their nasty bits brings to mind these days……..
Perhaps we should just go back to experimenting on humans and skip the animals lord knows some of them do deserve it ……..
* that was a lie I think, the first Rhinoplasty (nose job) was performed in ancient India, but the story is far more interesting this way …….
Remembering the Man who Put Tights in Our Hearts and Leggings in Our Bellies.
The original post has been polished a little. For more interesting and relevant reading please refer to the wikipedia article on which this is based ……
This week saw the death and mourning of Dr. Micheal DeBakey (1908-2008) a man who was a pioneer, philanthropist and true healer; stuck in a profession filled with money minded, hypocritical, over-achievers who spend their whole lives looking for the day they can open their private practice or will be asked to become partner in one.
You see when Dr. DeBakey (or as his Lebanese parents knew him, Michel Dabagh (name changes were probably all the rage back then) began his career back in 1932 there were 2 areas you definitely didn’t operate in, the heart (because you needed it to keep moving) and the aorta (because the patient would bleed to death in seconds, it’s kind of like a mono-rail for all the blood in the body). By the time he died (last week) he had invented the heart lung machine and the Dacron Graft (also used for tights, leggings and speedos; a devils tool indeed) and thus devised the following procedures (he also managed to modify others):
- Open heart surgery: Technically do-able but never really took off until his machine was made, it was first used in a stab wound injury, the patient managed to survive*
- Coronary Artery Bypass (CABG, Cabbage): This is when you use a vein to bypass a blockage in the arteries that feed the heart. I think he did about 70,000 of them, our boys couldn’t do 7,000 hemmoroidectomies in a life time.*
- The carotid endarterectomy (with synthetic dacron patch): DeBakey devised a procedure that would remove all the clots from the main vessels which supply the brain; thus preventing strokes.He would make a whole in the vessel, and use the surgical equivalent of an plunger (well not really, but very similar to one) to scrape the inside of the artery and use the Dacron to patch it up. (Something tells me he may have been a plumber in a previous life)*
- Dacron aortic aneurysm repair: Debakey would repair burst aortas by essentially patching them with stockings. The idea was pure genius and not only allowed doctors to operate on the aorta but also to fix things should other (dumber) doctors manage to cut a hole in one. To this day 1 in every 10 people die after undergoing the procedure ….. this wasn’t one of his better achievements…..
He also invent the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital or M.A.S.H. which prevented a couple of deaths during the Korean war and more importantly inspired one of the coolest T.V. shows ever! (You’ve got to love the idea of working in shitty hospital with shitty patients in the middle of a shitty place and having to drink yourself to kill the boredom….. that was the premise of the show and sounds eerily familiar ….)
DeBakey is even famous for proving that cigarettes are bad for you, he spent a whole year in 1939 trying to prove it but never could …. it was later proved by someone far more presistant a couple of years later.
It’s hard not to admire someone who has done so much and is such and inspiration, he continued to practice medicine until the day he died and I’m sure he wouldn’t have had it any other way…..
Despite all of his work the only thing that got named after him was the DeBakey forceps and some pre-med highschool for nerds, geeks and dumb parents with too much money.
I just can’t see why people should do their best and sacrifice if all you can hope for is having a your name used on a pair of tweezers and by some school as a cheap way to hoard money with the educational equivalent of the George Forman grill …..
* His work eventually became divided into 2 different disciplines, heart surgery (valves, arteries, viens of the heart) and vascular surgery (fixing all the rest)
Recent Comments