Heart Operation

A young man was knifed to the heart in Harlem one night last week. Lightning had been flashing through the hot city for hours, brighter & brighter, and about the time they got the young man to Sydenham Hospital the thunder crashed and the rain came down. They called Acting Chief Surgeon Dr. Edward Finestone in from Far Rockaway, 24 miles out on Long Island. Dr. Finestone, driving in fast through the storm, had a bad skid and a slight crackup, but he got to the hospital.

The young man on the operating table, close to death, got a local anesthetic. Dr. Finestone did a rib section and cut through the pericardial sac. As the blood spurted out of the right ventricle of the young man's wounded heart, an assistant surgeon caught it in sterile cups and sponges, and they put the blood back in the patient's body by transfusion. Dr. Finestone held the heart in his hand and stitched it up with long silk stitches. It jumped, he said, "like a fish out of water."

It was a two-hour job. The young man woke up at one point and wanted to know what was going on, so they gave him an intravenous anesthetic and a hypodermic. They put a tube in the lung cavity to prevent air accumulation there. The patient rested, with a 50-50 chance.

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