Medicine: Embolectomy

Recently Sir Thomas Lewis, eminent London heart specialist, made a special study of how an arm or leg dies when an embolus (floating clot) plugs a main artery which feeds blood to that limb. Competent heart specialists and surgeons generally see such blood-starved limbs too late to save them from gangrene and amputation. Last week, by chance, a Chicago doctor, Geza deTakats, in the American Journal of Surgery, and a Toronto doctor, Donald Walton Gordon Murray, in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, each gave explicit directions for locating such a destructive clot, removing...