Transplantation at 100 Years: Alexis Carrel, Pioneer Surgeon. To Lourdes, he examined a 17-year-old girl who was near death with tuberculous peritonitis; she had a. Alexis Carrel was a medical scientist and author of international renown. Born in 1873 in Sainte Foy les Lyon, the son. To Lourdes, it was perfectly simple to.

MIRACLES AND THE NOBEL LAUREATE Rev. Jaki A 'new' book marks a semi-centennial anniversary Scientific fame is not immune to gradual fading.

Even the glitter of a Nobel Prize wears off as time goes on. The name of Alexis Carrel (1873-1944), a Nobel laureate, is not a household word today. Yet many a household should feel greatly indebted to him. Hp Deskjet F2280 All-in-one Printer Driver. Carrel developed, with the assistance of Charles Lindbergh, the heart pump without which bypass surgery would be inconceivable. Three decades before that, in the opening years of this century, Carrel pioneered in blood-vessel surgery in humans, in organ transplants in animals, and in keeping alive tissues from warm-blooded animals—feats for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1912. The fifth day of this November is the 50th anniversary of the death of Carrel, who spent much of his active life at the Rockefeller Institute in New York.

President Taft took it for a great American honor when Carrel received the Nobel Prize. Hopefully, major Catholic intellectual centers in America will not miss a golden opportunity this November. A miracle observed Carrel died as a genuinely devout Catholic. His Catholic death is all the more significant because for most of his life Carrel was a resolute agnostic. Indeed it took a special resolve to keep shoring up his agnosticism. The reason for this lies in a most unexpected event in Carrel's life in 1902, the very year when he achieved international fame by solving the age-old medical problem of suturing ruptured blood vessels. By then Carrel had been thinking about that problem for almost eight years.

He was in his third year of medical school when medical science failed to save President Carnot of France, who died in 1894 after an assassin's bullet severed one of his major arteries. Carrel began actual experimentation on the problem after he had been attached, in 1898, to the laboratory of J.

Testut, a famed anatomist, at the University of Lyons. But ultimately, the year 1902 became crucial in Carrel's life for another reason. On May 25 of that year Carrel yielded to the entreaties of a colleague who, at the last minute, could not accompany a 'white train' carrying scores of sick from Lyons to Lourdes.

Carrel's own interest in rapid healings would hardly have been sufficient to persuade him to go to Lourdes and study the medically startling facts for which Lourdes had already been famous—or infamous, in the eyes of much of the scientific and academic establishment. It was even more unplanned that on the same train Carrel would find a 23 year-old woman, Marie Bailly, dying of tubercular peritonitis. Hers was a well-attested case in the medical circles of Lyons.

In April 1902 doctors refused to operate on her lest they hasten her death. Because of her desperate condition, she had no hope to obtain a doctor's permission to get on the train. But through the ruse of a nurse, she was spirited on board just a few seconds before the train departed from Lyons at 1 PM on May 26. During the night Carrel, fearing she would die aboard the train, gave her morphine injections. Marie Bailly was half-unconscious when the train arrived at Lourdes, around noon on May 27. She did not realize she was in Lourdes until evening of that day. Some (though far from all) basic details of what happened on the train and during the next two days were narrated by Carrel himself in his, published in 1949, four years after his death.

The next year, there followed an English translation,. It is possibly the most moving account of a miracle in Lourdes and of an agnostic doctor's wrestling with his conscience.

But precisely because Carrel's account is so personal and moving, it lacks many scientific and documentary details. Serial Hp12c Platinum 3.2. Such details alone would have turned the book into a major scientific testimony to a scientifically unexplainable event.