Medicine: For a Dog's Life

Each Thursday evening a chest surgeon from Hollywood (Fla.) Memorial Hospital scrubs up in a local operating room, lays bare a patient's heart and performs delicate—usually lifesaving—surgery on it. What makes these operations unusual is that they are performed at a veterinary hospital and the patients are dogs, victims of heartworms.

Dr. Myron Segal, 35, with an arm-long string of qualifications for human surgery, including the straight-to-the-heart type, got into the sideline of saving dogs' lives by accident. Where he had lived, in Montreal and Boston, heartworm was no problem. But in the South (where the worm larvae are carried by flies...

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