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THE BLALOCK-TAUSSIG SHUNT : A MAJOR ADVANCE (GROLIER). First edition, rare separately-paginated offprint (journal pagination 189-202), of this landmark paper on cardiac surgery. "Cardiac surgery owes much to the team from Johns Hopkins that developed an operation for tetralogy of Fallot, a common form of cyanotic congenital heart disease. The Blalock-Taussig or blue baby operation, first performed by Alfred Blalock in 1944, was immediately recognized as a major advance … Helen Taussig, the pioneer pediatric cardiologist, was the first to suggest the creation of an anastomosis between the systemic and pulmonary circulation, and she urged Blalock to develop the innovative operation. Blalock, working with his African-American laboratory assistant Vivien Thomas, eventually succeeded in finding a means of connecting the left subclavian artery to the pulmonary artery, thus creating a shunt that dramatically increased the pulmonary blood flow" (Grolier Medicine 97). "The conception and execution of this operation was brilliant in several ways. It was a triumph of technique … It was brilliant in conception as a method of relieving severe disability, and … last and perhaps most important of all, it showed that cyanotic congenital heart disease, previously incurable and always fatal, could be cured by surgery. This inspired and stimulated the enormous advances in cardiac surgery which followed with almost breathless rapidity within a very short period of time" (Lord Russell Brock in Westaby and Bosher eds., Landmarks in Cardiac Surgery, Oxford, 1997, p 112). "Helen Taussig was a brilliant physician whose contributions advanced the status of women in medicine, her insightful observations influenced the development of cardiac surgery, and she developed a new subspecialty in pediatrics and wrote its first definitive textbook" (DMB 5, p. 1221). Vivien Thomas was the subject of the 2004 HBO movie Something the Lord Made . ABPC/RBH record 3 copies. "The original procedure was named for Alfred Blalock, surgeon, Culloden, GA (1899 1964), Helen B. Taussig, cardiologist, Baltimore/Boston (1898 1986) and Vivien Thomas (1910 1985) who was at that time Blalock s laboratory assistant. They all helped to develop the procedure. Taussig, who treated hundreds of infants and children with this disorder, had observed that children with a cyanotic heart defect and a patent ductus arteriosus (PDA) lived longer than those without the PDA. It, therefore, seemed to her that a shunt that mimicked the function of a PDA might relieve the tetralogy patients' poor oxygenation. In 1943, having broached the possibility of a surgical solution to Robert Gross of Boston without success, Taussig approached Blalock and Thomas in their Hopkins laboratory in 1943. According to the account of the original consultation between the three provided in Vivien Thomas' 1985 autobiography Partners of the Heart, Taussig carefully described the anomaly of Tetralogy of Fallot, but made no suggestion about the specific surgical correction required, observing merely that it should be possible to get more blood to the lungs, "as a plumber changes pipes around." Although Taussig was not aware of it at that time, Blalock and Thomas had already experimented with such an anastomosis, one that Blalock had conceived years earlier for a different purpose but which had the unanticipated effect of re-routing blood to the lungs. The operation involved the joining of the subclavian artery to the pulmonary artery. After meeting with Taussig, the two men set about perfecting the operation in the animal lab, with Thomas performing the subclavian-to-pulmonary anastomosis alone in some 200 laboratory dogs, then adapting the instruments for the first human surgery from those used on the experimental animals" (Wikipedia). "Helen Taussig s idea for treating blue baby syndrome was to create a connection between the aorta and the pulmonary artery, increasing blood flow to the lungs. Blalock and Thomas. Seller Inventory # 5630
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