5 March, 1961
Dear Margaret,
I was delighted as can be to receive your nice letter. I wish to extend, however, my deep sympathy to you in the loss of your brother, and am sorry this had to be the occasion for your return to Europe.
I have been in correspondence with Dubost, and expect I shall visit his service sometime late is June, if anything is to be in progress at that time, otherwise perhaps a little earlier. He has invited me to participate in a symposium on deep hypothermia about the 15th of June, but my family travel arrangements are such that it appears to be utterly impossible. We shall lose our apartment here on June 10, and cannot see what they want to see of Scandinavia and still arrive in Paris in time for the symposium.
Our work here has been most fascinating. We are trying the use of left heart bypass for acute left heart failure. It is much simpler than trying to use an oxygenator too, and I have learned to put a cannula down the jugular, on man or the dog, with relative ease, through the atrial septum, and into the left atrium for the purpose. Angiocardiograms with dogs have shown that in this fashion we are able to run bypass effectively enough so that no blood at all passes into the left ventricle, and the aorta fills only in retrograde fashion from the cannula in the femoral artery. Of 10 dogs run in this fashion for 24 hours, nine are long-term survivors, and the 3 which died were lost from silly technical errors, such as burning the dog with a hot pad. Oxygen utilization studies have shown that such a measure cuts the use as measured from the coronary sinus-aorta A-V difference and sinus flow rate to about 40% of control values. Senning and I hope to get some patients in the three weeks he has left here, especially we hope to get the bad mitrals who cannot be gotten in shape for surgery on a medical basis, put them on the bypass long enough to get the lungs cleared, and to go ahead with the mitral repair right off. I have another silly-sounding approach to the problem also. I have only half sold it to Senning, but think it will be worked out in May and April here after he has left to go to Zurich. I am happy that the prospects of working together led him to defer his departure 6 months, as we have gotten much accomplished.
Shall look forward to seeing you on return, and from the above and your letter, I suspect we shall have much to talk over and much to plan and to do.
Please say hello to Merel for me. Is he really coming?
Clarence