Medicine: Highways & Byways

Artery disease is mysterious and confronts the physician with grave difficulties, no matter where it occurs in the body. But when nature, for safety's sake, packaged the brain and its delicate, complex system of blood circulation inside a bone box, it made things especially tough for doctors. At last week's annual Clinical Congress of the American College of Surgeons in San Francisco, the nation's leading medical researchers agreed that the chief obstacle to effective surgery on cranial arteries is one of man's quaint anatomical features—the Circle of Willis (see diagram).

The four ascending...

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