In the dawning age of the surgical transplant, there seems to be no end to the variety of daring and delicate feats that surgeons are willing to try in the hope of saving patients who would otherwise be doomed by the failure of a vital organ.
A young Colorado mother was getting along well last week although her liver had been replaced by one taken from a dead man. A boy of twelve was living a normal life in his Pueblo, Colo., home with his mother's spleen inside him, while his mother went about her chores with no spleen at all. A couple of lung transplants have been tried, and though the patients died, there will soon be others.
Two from a Monkey. Today, at least twoscore Americans are going about their business kept alive and active by kidneys transplanted from other people. Some of the donors were living at the time of the operation, some were dead; some were close kin, some unrelated. In Denver, Royal Jones, 12, went blind for a while because of kidney disease but is now well enough to play ball, thanks to a transplant last November from his mother. Another Denver patient, Jerry Will Ruth, 24, got a kidney from Brother Billy, 22; he pumps gas and greases cars, declares, "I feel as good as I ever felt in my life."
The youngest patient ever to receive a kidney transplant was operated on recently in a Manhattan hospital: not yet two years old, the little white boy had a kidney transplanted from a Negro boy of 13, who died of a brain tumor. A man in Virginia whose body sloughed off one kidney transplant was making medical history by apparently accepting a second. These were all "homotransplants" (between two humans). But in New Orleans, a woman for whom no donor could be found in time, had a pair of monkey kidneys implanted in her groin. This was the first significant "heterotransplant" (between different species), important even though it finally failed and the patient went back on the artificial kidney.
No less ingenious are "autotrans-plants" of a patient's organs to a different part of his own body. Kidneys have been thus transplanted at the University of Mississippi Medical Center so that they might continue working although the tube that connected them to the bladder had been damaged by disease or injury. Parts of the adrenal glands that bestride the kidneys have been moved to the thigh to facilitate continued treatment without repeated major operations.
Precise Timing. The latest liver surgery in Denver involved the deathwatch and precise timing that are a common feature of homotransplants. Housewife Jeanine Goodfellow, 29, of Arvada, arrived at the University of Colorado Medical Center in September with cancer of the liver so advanced that her only real hope of life lay in taking the long chance of becoming the first human being to survive with a transplanted liver.