Blalock, Dr. Alfred 1899-1964

CODEVELOPER OF THE OPERATION THAT SAVED BLUE BABIES

A Pioneering Operation.

On 9 November 1944 Johns Hopkins surgeon Alfred Blalock carefully made a long incision and exposed a child's beating heart. Then, for three hours, he performed an operation no one had ever done before. The baby was slightly more than a year old but only weighed ten pounds and was not expected to live. Blalock believed that he and Dr. Helen Taussig had discovered how to increase blood flow to the lungs in "blue babies" suffering from anoxemia, or an inadequate oxygen supply. With the baby's heart exposed, Blalock could select a mediumsized artery, clamp it, cut it through, and tie off the useless upper end. He stitched the lower end into a hole he had made in the side of the pulmonary artery, thus bypassing the pulmonary artery's narrow entrance. All the time the operation was going on, one of the baby's lungs was collapsed. When he removed the...

[The entire page is 991 words long]

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