The first problem to be tackled was shock, which was, in brief, found to be due to a decrease in the effective volume of the circulation. To combat shock, the volume had to be restored, and the obvious substance was blood itself. In 1901 Karl Landsteiner, then in Austria, discovered the ABO blood groups, and in 1914 sodium citrate was added to freshly drawn blood to prevent clotting. Blood was occasionally transfused during World War I, but three-quarters of a pint was considered a large amount. These transfusions were given by directly linking the vein of a donor with that of the recipient. The continuous drip method, in which blood flows from a flask, was introduced by Hugh Marriott and Alan Kekwick at the Middlesex Hospital, London, in 1935.

As blood transfusions increased in frequency and volume, blood banks were required. Although it took another World War before these were organized on a large scale, the first tentative steps were taken by Sergey Sergeyevich Yudin of Moscow, who in 1933 used cadaver blood, and by Bernard Fantus of Chicago, who four years later used living donors as his source of supply. Saline solution, plasma, artificial plasma expanders, and other solutions were also used in the appropriate circumstances.

Sometimes after operations (especially abdominal operations), the gut becomes paralyzed. It is distended, and quantities of fluid would pour into it, dehydrating the body. In 1932 Owen Wangensteen at the University of Minnesota advised decompressing the bowel, and in 1934 two other Americans, Thomas Miller and William Abbott of Philadelphia, invented an apparatus for this purpose, a tube with an inflatable balloon on the end that could be passed into the small intestine. The fluid lost from the tissues was replaced by a continuous intravenous drip of saline solution on the principle described by Rudolph Matas of New Orleans in 1924. These techniques dramatically improved abdominal surgery, especially in cases of obstruction, peritonitis (inflammation of the abdominal membranes), and acute emergencies generally, since they made it possible to keep the bowel empty and at rest.

Anesthesia and thoracic surgery

The strides taken in anesthesia from the 1920s onward allowed surgeons much more freedom. Rectal anesthesia had never proved satisfactory, and the first improvement on the combination of nitrous oxide, oxygen, and ether was the introduction of the general anesthetic cyclopropane by Ralph Waters of Madison, Wisconsin, in 1933. Soon afterward, intravenous anesthesia was introduced. John Lundy of the Mayo Clinic brought to a climax a long series of trials by many workers when he used Pentothal (thiopental sodium, a barbiturate) to put a patient peacefully to sleep. Then, in 1942, Harold Griffith and G. Enid Johnson of Montreal produced muscular paralysis by the injection of a purified preparation of curare. This was harmless since, by then, the anesthetist was able to control the patient’s respiration.

If there was one person who was aided more than any other by the progress in anesthesia, it was the thoracic (chest) surgeon. What had challenged thoracic surgery previously was the collapse of the lung, which occurred whenever the pleural cavity was opened. Since the end of the 19th century, many and ingenious methods had been devised to prevent this from happening. The best known was the negative pressure cabinet of Ernst Ferdinand Sauerbruch, then at Mikulicz’s clinic at Breslau; the cabinet was first demonstrated in 1904 but was destined soon to become obsolete.

The solution lay in inhalational anesthesia administered under pressure. Indeed, when Théodore Tuffier, in 1891, successfully removed the apex of a lung for tuberculosis, this was the technique that he used; he even added an inflatable cuff around the tube inserted in the trachea to ensure a gas-tight fit. Tuffier was ahead of his time, however, and other surgeons and research workers wandered into confused and complex byways before Ivan Magill and Edgar Rowbotham, working at Gillies’s plastic-surgery unit, found their way back to the simplicity of the endotracheal tube and positive pressure. In 1931 Ralph Waters showed that respiration could be controlled either by squeezing the anesthetic bag by hand or by using a small motor.

These advances allowed thoracic surgery to move into modern times. In the 1920s, operations had been performed mostly for infective conditions and as a last resort. The operations necessarily were unambitious and confined to collapse therapy, including thoracoplasty (removal of ribs), apicolysis (collapse of a lung apex and artificially filling the space), and phrenic crush (which paralyzed the diaphragm on the chosen side); to isolation of the area of lung to be removed by first creating pleural adhesions; and to drainage.

The technical problems of surgery within the chest were daunting until Harold Brunn of San Francisco reported six lobectomies (removals of lung lobes) for bronchiectasis with only one death. (In bronchiectasis one or more bronchi or bronchioles are chronically dilated and inflamed, with copious discharge of mucus mixed with pus.) The secret of Brunn’s success was the use of intermittent suction after surgery to keep the cavity free of secretions until the remaining lobes of the lung could expand to fill the space. In 1931 Rudolf Nissen in Berlin removed an entire lung from a girl with bronchiectasis. She recovered to prove that the risks were not as bad as had been feared.

Cancer of the lung became a major disease of the 20th century, whether because of a genuine increase or because of improved techniques of diagnosis. As far back as 1913 a Welshman, Hugh Davies, removed a lower lobe for cancer, but a new era began when Evarts Graham removed a whole lung for cancer in 1933. The patient, a doctor, was still alive at the time of Graham’s death in 1957.

The thoracic part of the esophagus is particularly difficult to reach, but in 1909 British surgeon Arthur Evans successfully operated on it for cancer. Results were generally poor until, in 1944, John Garlock of New York showed that it is possible to excise the esophagus and to bring the stomach up through the chest and join it to the pharynx. Lengths of colon were also used as grafts to bridge the gap.