The heart is becoming more and more accessible to surgical repair. Along with surgical ingenuity, the devices that have made much open-heart surgery feasible are the mechanical pumps that complement the blood-circulating functions of living tissue. Last week two such machines scored dramatic advances:
> In Houston, a Mexican beautician named Mrs. Esperanza del Valle Vasquez, 37, was helped to survive ten crucial postoperative days by being hooked up to one of Dr. Michael DeBakey's plastic "half-hearts," developed at Baylor and Rice universities. Used mostly outside rather than partly inside the...
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