Rent Heart

A diagnostic error by distinguished Professor Ferdinand Sauerbruch, Berlin Specialist in lung surgery, ast ounded the German Surgical Society last week. He tried to make a joke of the matter, which his colleagues helped out. They like him.

A girl had gone to Professor Sauerbruch with a bulge at the right side of her chest. The bulge had appeared after an attack of influenza. Professor Sauerbruch ordered an X-ray made. The picture indicated a tumor in her chest cavity. Nothing but a blister, decided Professor Sauerbruch. He had but recently operated on a man for the same thing.

He cut a hole through the girl's ribs and stuck an aspirating needle into the "blister." No fluid oozed through the needle's lumen. The professor poked again. Unexpectedly bright red blood spurted from the hollow needle. The "blister" was really an aneurism, a bulging of the girl's weak-walled heart, and he had ruptured the heart. Her blood was flooding through the rent.

Like the Dutch boy at the pierced dike, the professor stuck his finger in the hole. As an excited assistant stitched up the hole, Professor Sauerbruch slowly withdrew his finger-plug, until all was laced tight, like a football. The girl got well.

Admitted the professor last week, with a smile at himself: "I should never have dared to operate if I had known that the apparent blister was a cardiac aneurism. The diagnosis was wrong, the operation successful."

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