Persuasion was written by Jane Austen while she was ill and was completed in 1816. It was her last novel and was not published until 1818, 1 year after her death.
From NOVA: Pioneers of Heart Surgery
One of the first surgeons to use improved techniques to gain access to the heart was Dr. Dwight Harken, a young U.S. Army surgeon. Many of Harken's patients were young soldiers evacuated from the European front with shell fragments and bullets lodged inside their hearts. To leave the shrapnel in was dangerous, but removing it was almost surely fatal. Harken began operating on animals, trying to develop a technique that would allow him to cut into the wall of a still beating heart, insert a finger, locate the shrapnel and remove it. All of his first 14 animals subjects died. Of the second group of 14, half died. Of the third group of 14, only 2 died. Harken felt ready to try the technique on humans. All of his patients survived, proving that the human heart could be operated upon.
It wasn't long before surgeons began wondering if Harken's technique might be applied to defective heart valves. In 1948, within days of each other, Harken and a Philadelphia surgeon, Dr. Charles Bailey, independently reported on a daring procedure to correct mitral stenosis. Just as with the soldiers, a small hole was cut in the side of a beating heart and a finger was inserted to find and very carefully widen the narrowed valve. Early results were disastrous, with the majority of patients dying. Gradually, though, surgeons improved their technique and the procedure became quite safe. This kind of blind surgery -- or closed heart surgery -- spread to hospitals around the world.
On September 2, 1952, two University of Minnesota surgeons, Dr. Walton Lillehei and Dr. John Lewis, attempted the first open heart surgery on a five-year-old girl who had been born with a hole in her heart. Anaesthetized to stop her shivering, the girl was cooled by a special blanket until her body temperature reached 81 degrees F. At this temperature, she could survive without a pumping heart for ten minutes, not four. Clamping the inflow to her heart so that it emptied of blood, Lillehei and Lewis cut open her heart, which was still slowly beating, and quickly sewed up the hole. With the repaired heart working properly for the first time in her life, the girl was then immersed in a bath of warm water to bring her body temperature back to normal. The operation was a success."
This post has a lot of heart.
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