Blood and Guts has left the pioneering days of the pillars of surgery and is now in the cutting edge zone (ho ho) of cardiac procedures. It is seemingly a procession of clunking, wheezing, whirring heart-lung machines which explode regularly and still occasionally a patient survives. Before this any number of weird solutions to keeping a patient alive while cutting into the heart were employed. Sometimes a donor would provide heart and lung function for the patient. Blood was oxygenated by sterilised monkey or dog lungs - and some of these patients also made it through.
Then there is the hilarious tale of the scientists who endeavoured to extract a chemical from hibernating groundhogs in the hope that they could lower the temperature of patients thereby reducing their oxygen requirements and giving longer to operate on the heart. They actually found something which they called hibernin and used it on live patients apparently with success, only to discover from the patent office that the substance was already registered as a plasticiser; they had extracted this from the tubes used in the experiment rather than from the groundhogs. It worked because it contained alcohol which explained why the nurses reported the patients drunk in the recovery room. Doh! And yet it works!
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