A man of many artificial parts was lawyer Frank Tull. His teeth had been fashioned for him and fitted to his jaws by a doctor of dental surgery ...He had a silver plate in his skull to guard a hole from which a brain tumor had been removed. One of his legs was made of metal and fiber; it took the place of the flesh-and-blood leg his mother had given him in her womb ...In his left arm, a platinum wire took the place of the humerus . . . One hundred years after he died they opened up his coffin. All they found were strings and wires.
In 1935, when Author Charles Finney created him as a character in the novel The Circus of Dr. Lao, Frank Tull was considered to be, at most, the product of a fertile imagination. Yet, less than 40 years later, the concept of semi-artificial man no longer seems as farfetched. Though modern medicine has yet to produce a real-life counterpart of television's Six Million Dollar Man* it has developed workable replacements for many important body parts, and is steadily moving toward the day when hospitals may well have to follow the lead of auto-repair shops and add spare parts departments to their facilities.
Man has been replacing damaged portions of his body with artificial parts for centuries. Peg legs have been used since 600 B.C., and metal hands since the 16th century. Boston Silversmith Paul Revere was well known for the quality of the false teeth he fashioned long before his midnight message to Massachusetts' minutemen. But today's many and various replacements, made of such space-age materials as Teflon, the nonstick plastic, and pyrolytic carbon, a diamond-hard substance, are far more sophisticated. Unlike earlier devices, which were worn outside the body and usually removed at night, they are true replacements, designed to be implanted permanently and to duplicate, if not actually improve upon nature. Some examples:
LIMBS. Artificial thigh bones made of titanium and other modern alloys are being developed, primarily by Japanese surgeons. Dr. Yasuto Itami, of Tokyo, recently designed and implanted a titanium and polyethylene thigh bone that can be precisely adjusted to fit the patient when it is installed. Other orthopedists are using cords of woven Dacron—which is chemically inert and thus will not trigger an immune response —to repair or replace damaged tendons. Dr. William Harrison Jr. of Tulsa, Okla., uses Dacron tubing to repair separated shoulders; the material forms a scaffolding or framework upon which new ligament can grow and is so effective that one 17-year-old patient went back to competitive wrestling eight weeks after treatment.