The Birmingham age-herald., 1907-08-26
Modern Science Has Made
 Enormous Strides
SURGERY OF THE HEART
How Operations Are Performed on the Brain-"Cat Fear Disease" Now Recognized as
 Real Affection.
BY FREDERIC J. HASKlN.

New inventions, new methods of travel, and modern diversions develop new diseases We now have the tele- phone ear, the bicycles stoop. the auto mobile eye. and the roller skate cough. Pittsburg physicians recently argued against roller skating on the ground that it brought dust and finely powder ed wood from the floors and so caused a painful and dangerous cough that may lead 10 tuberculosis, The cures that modern science works are no less strange than the odd diseases 10 which we are subject. Even as Adam Is be- ieved to have done remarkably well after he had strong rib removed, so dozens of human beings have been found to get along without organs which were formerly deemed absolute ly essential The New York woman who was deprived of her stomach and afterward went on her way rejoicing, has been followed along the same sur gical path by a dozen others, who have only to eat oftener and of more dlgesti- ble food than other people, to appear perfectly normal.
 Long ago a wound through the heart was regarded as fatal. Surgery of to- day does not always allow it 10 be so> Field hospital operations in the South African war demonstrated that this delicate organ could be sewed up us others had been, and since then 1t has ] been massaged, washed. cleaned and pretty roughly handled in order that it's usefulness as q life giver might not 1 in aIi cate of all organs, has been pried into. abcesses taken from among it's con volutions, and even diseased parts of 1t removed successfully. A western man. who had his skull trephined after a long period of epilepsy for which a blood clot was removsd had silver plate set in the top of his head, and was assured of lifting this before the mirror to assure himself at intervals 1 that his brains were still all the
 Not long ago in London a man suf fering from insanity was opera ted on. An excess of cerebre spinal fluid was drawn from his brain. where 1t had interfered with the proper functions of the arteries. and as result req son ! was happily restored. Skin grating has been tried with extraordinary sue cess in many instances. There Is an old theory that If one-thrd of the body is burned that death must follow, be- cause the skin will not have the power to reproduce so great an amount of itself. fs sctory girl, who was ter ribly scalded in an Iexplosion, and who had third of her skin removed, was saved by a process of skin grating, each of her associates giving a square inch of skin from her thigh to help save her comrades life. Another in cident of like gravity, brought out the possibilities of grating skin from frogs on the burned surface. girl acci- dentally scalded by machinery in q factory, was successfully treated by hair grating in the same way.
 A young lawyer in Muncie, Ind. has the distinction of being the only man | in this country whose head Is joined to his shoulders by silver wire. From childhood he suffered from white ab- ccsses of the spine, and in removing the last of these, n surgeon of Glasgow, Scotland, found it necessary to cut d muscle. This he repaired with silver wire Later q part of the breast bone was also removed, and this young man has also silver plate taking the place of that needed member. A Phila- delphia hospital last spring had as a patient an old man with a broken back, and as a last resort the plintered spine was removed and q silver plate sub stituted. A crippled girl of Lehigh county, Pennsylyania, was dropped by her nurse with the result that her neck was dislocated. One day when the pain of a headache was almost in tolerable, the girl grasped her head to press 1t between her hands and ac- cidentally snapped the neck back into place. She began to get well and could soon walk about.
 Unusual accidents are often the cause of queer diseases. A Florence, N. J.. girl laughed so merrily at a story that she could not stop. She laughed Tor