Omentum for the Heart

For a painful condition caused by an inadequate flow of blood to the heart, some patients can be helped enormously by operations in which their arteries are revamped to send more blood to the heart muscle (TIME, June 28. 1948). But many victims have such enlarged and feeble ("failing") hearts that they cannot withstand the drastic operation, so doctors can only send them home to drag out a few months of painful invalidism.

One such case seemed to be Horace Watkins, 52, an Ontario electrical inspector. When he entered Montreal's Jewish General Hospital, he could walk only six steps before pain and exhaustion stopped him. But Dr. Arthur Vineberg had been operating on animals, testing his own refinements of a basic technique suggested by British Surgeon Laurence O'Shaughnessy (who was killed at Dunkirk). Dr. Vineberg opened Watkins' chest, cut into the heart sac and removed part of its innermost layer, the epicardium. This exposed the enlarged left ventricle. From the abdominal cavity he pulled up a flap of the omentum, a layer of fatty tissue which has a generous blood supply, and attached it so that the omentum's blood would nourish the left ventricle.

Watkins sat up in bed that night and went home a few days later. That was in July. Taking things easy at home, he now finds he can get around without trouble, can even climb stairs. Cardiac surgeons will watch Watkins' progress when he goes back to work in a couple of weeks to see whether the omentum can give fresh momentum to failing hearts such as his.

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