Medicine: Grafted Brogue

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In a freak farm accident in Castle-blayney two years ago, Cyril Morrison, nine-year-old son of an Irish farm worker, got himself pinned between a tractor and a stone wall. The accident splintered the boy's jaw and sent a knifelike sliver slicing across the base of his tongue. It cut the tongue off close to the roots.

A local doctor put a temporary splint on the broken jawbone and sent Cyril to Belfast's Royal Victoria Hospital. His fractured jaw was soon on the road to recovery, but he still lacked a tongue. Last week, after a series of delicate grafting operations performed in London's Westminster Hospital, at the expense of Britain's national health plan, Cyril had a new tongue. It had been built by three surgeons out of muscle tissue from the floor of his mouth wrapped around with thinly sliced skin from his arm.

Cyril can now swallow and talk haltingly. A final graft will soon give his new tongue a tip, Cyril's doctors hope, and restore his rich, native brogue. "It was an unusual operation," said modest Plastic Surgeon J. P. Reidy last week, "only because it was an unusual accident."