A unique breed of doctors gathered 800 strong in Seattle last week for their annual get-together. They were far younger than the general run of medical specialists —mostly in their 303—and so devoted to learning that they packed the meeting rooms for no fewer than 84 self-improvement lectures during the week. "They're the damndest eager beavers you ever saw," said an oldster (41) among them. They were the members of the American Society of Anesthesiologists.
Partly because their specialty is relatively new and fast gaining in importance, the anesthesiologists have none of the stuffy dignity of the oldtime, frock-coated specialist. They talk freely and colloquially about their work, often lapsing into unprofessional profanity. They have something good and they know it.
The day when an anesthetist was usually an undertrained nurse-technician, who merely slapped a mask on a patient's face or jabbed a needle into his arm, has passed. Modern anesthesiology has been developed, mainly in the past 15 years, to a complex discipline. In the best medical centers, the anesthesiologist ranks with the internist and the surgeon, has equal responsibility for the patient's care and survival. Said a noted chest surgeon recently: "The anesthesiologist is the forgotten hero. The surgeon gets the glory, but without the anesthesiologist's skill the surgeon wouldn't get very far."
Finger in the Heart. In no area of surgery has the anesthesiologist played a more vital role than in operations inside the heart. Ten or 15 years ago, little or nothing could be done for the patient with a constricted mitral valve (usually the result of rheumatic fever). Then surgeons at .Philadelphia's Hahnemann Hospital devised a finger-tip knife for opening the valves. The trick was to do it without killing the patient.
That was where Anesthesiologist Kenneth Keown came in. He devised elaborate techniques for anesthetizing the patients and running sensitive tests during surgery to make suwf that they did not slip over the line into permanent oblivion. If their hearts, at best always on the point of failure, showed signs of stopping during the drastic operation, Dr. Keown was ready with a battery of revivers. The surgeon would work better without the nagging fear and responsibility for the patient's minute-to-minute reactions. The Hahnemann team's technique has already saved thousands of lives and is becoming standard the world around.
It was to Dr. Keown that the anesthesiologists looked last week as the grand old man of anesthesia for inside-the-heart surgery. What they saw was a crew-cut man of 36, who still looks like the halfback he was in junior college (Graceland, Iowa), only 17 years ago. Appropriately, it was another young giant of anesthesiology, Chicago's Dr. Max Samuel Sadove, 39, who put a capstone on Keown's work. "Ken has shown us the way, and we've followed," said Sadove, who won wide medical acclaim for his work in keeping the Brodie twins alive through many operations, including the one to separate their brains (TIME, Dec. 29).