Medicine: Triumphs of Surgery

From Illinois and Georgia last week came case histories of surgery's triumph over one of nature's malign quirks that was once invariably fatal, then permanently crippling. The anomaly: a baby, healthy-looking at birth, may prove to have no gullet (esophagus) to carry food from mouth to stomach. Sometimes there is a short, dead-end stretch of gullet at both top and bottom, but the middle section is missing. Often there is an opening between the defective gullet and the windpipe, so that air goes into the stomach and food into the lungs. Exact incidence of these defects is unknown: the best estimate...

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