Doctor Schwartz called up Doctor Charles Goodman, of 969 Madison Avenue, the attending surgeon, and told him that he was badly needed at once. Doctor Simon D. Ehrlich, the hospital’s anæsthetist, also was notified, and Ziff was carried to the operating room. Here Doctor Schwartz packed the wound with gauze and stopped the flow of blood, and everything was made ready to start work when Doctor Goodman arrived.
The operating surgeon arrived in record time, and then began some quick work. The flow of blood had to be stopped in the first place, and the patient anæsthetized for the operation. But if the chest where cut open to check the hemorrhage, the lungs would have collapsed from the air pressure on the outside, so air had to be pumped in until the inflation was sufficient to resist the pressure from without.
This process was combined with the application of the anæsthetic by the method known as intertracheal anæsthesia. By means of an apparatus operated by electricity, ether was mixed in a jar with air in the proportion considered advisable, and the resultant mixture forced through a tube far down into the patient’s throat. By this means anæsthesia was produced and the air within the lungs was raised to double the normal pressure.
With the patient anæsthetized and the lungs secured against danger of collapse, Doctor Goodman cut away three ribs and a piece of the breastbone. He found the chest full of blood, and this had to be drawn off before anything more could be done. When the blood was cleared away, Doctor Goodman found that the knife had made a big cut in the pericardium and that the point had gone flown nearly three-eighths of an inch into the heart.
The most ticklish part of the operation followed—sewing up the heart while it was palpitating. One stitch was sufficient to close the wound in the heart itself, three more did the work with the pericardium. Doctor Goodman sewed the skin together over the wound, and Ziff was put away to recover. He came out of the operation as rapidly as could have been expected, and except that the protection of the ribs over the heart will be missing, he is likely to be in no way the worse for his experience.
Had the point of the knife gone a millimeter or so farther in, Ziff never would have lived to get to the hospital, as the consequent hemorrhage would have been almost instantly fatal. The hospital authorities at first supposed from the nature and depth of the wound that he had been stabbed in a fight, and it was not until a day or two ago that Ziff recovered sufficiently to tell them how he had been injured.
“The Lady of the Lighthouse.”
Beautiful Mrs. Helen S. Woodruff, of New York, who lived in darkness for two years, is now working hard for the cause of the blind. In her own time of trial she patiently learned to “see through her fingers” and wrote the story, “The Lady of the Lighthouse,” which has made her famous.
When her sight was restored by a marvelous opera[{62}]tion, she was so grateful that she has devoted all her time and energy for the benefit of the New York Association of the Blind, which has established the original “Lighthouse” in New York.
Mrs. Woodruff is the first society woman who has acted for the “movies,” and she only consented to do this in the dramatization of her story because it would aid the cause of the blind. The photo play which illustrates her talks on the blind is to be shown all over the country, for charity.