Be still, that beating heart
With increasing precision in diagnosis and improved techniques in anaesthesia, cardiac surgery has become almost commonplace in recent years. But there has remained the problem of how to repair congenital defects in the two walls inside the heart – the interatrial and interventricular septa.
In order to gain access to this part of the heart, the organ has to be opened wide for some minutes and the circulation to the rest of the body maintained by a “heart-lung machine”, which not only pumps the blood round the body but also continues to oxygenate it.
The trouble…
