World War II

American Dwight Harken, stationed in England at 160th General Hospital (Cotswolds) , operating out of a Quonset hut, removed shell fragments and other foreign bodies from the hearts of wounded soldiers, relying on fluoroscopy to locate fragments, endotracheal incubation, whole-blood transfusions, and penicillin. The surgeries, which required cutting into bleeding hearts, had to be performed in under a minute [elsewhere, under three minutes] (Jeffrey, 44-45). Harken had removed bullets from hearts before the war, but during the war he was observed by leading London surgeons; he came on 18 Feb, when he successfully operated on Leroy Rohrbach (Morris, ch 1). Over a period of 10 months, Harken removed 78 “missles” (bullets) within or proximate to the great vessels and extracted 56 foreign bodies from the heart , 13 of them from the heart chambers. He operated on 134 patients without a single death . He “routinely opened the pleura at a time when most surgeons were obsessed with extrapleural approaches” (Symbas & Justicz, 790).