At Charity Hospital, the operation begins.
"There are many points on which you must be absolutely certain before making this incision," says the surgeon, beginning the dangerous operation..
His scapel moves. The tissues open. The knife goes deep into the abdominal cavity of a living human being.
The surgeon's hands work swiftly. He talks loudly, clearly, as though to an unseen audience. He begins to clamp blood vessels, to reduce the amount of blood in the cavity,
"This is a bad situation you sometimes run into" he says, pointing to an unforeseen difficulty.
"But there is a way to get around it if you can do so quickly..."
A mile away, seated before a bank of color television screens at Municipal Auditorium, several hundred doctors and surgeons watch every move, grasp every word.
In the old days not more than 10 or 15 could crowd close enough to see the fine detail work of a surgical demonstration.
Now the number is theoreti- call unlimited. At The Audi torium, facilities have been arranged for hundreds. The focus is close, the image large and clear. They can see the incision, the layers of tissue, the sponges, the diseased organ which is being removed.
—All this, in repeated scenes
which will vary only in details
as the operation varies from
thyroid to gall bladder to other
types of surgery^ will take place
Mar. 6-8 in a four-day teaching program of the New Orleans Graduate Medical Assembly.
The Tulane and LSU units at Charity Hospital will perform the surgical demonstrations.
CAMERAMAN TROUBLE
A mobile color broadcast unit will be set up at the hospital to relay the "performance" to doctors participating in the assembly at Municipal Auditorium. A doctor who participated in a similar television demonstration when the International Surgical Society met here in 1948 said it proved the favorable claims made for color television as "medicine's great new teaching aid,"
"Our only difficulty was with the human factor, not the cameras," he said,
"Several cameramen weakened at the sight of blood and of the exposed vital organs. For a while it seemed we would be left without cameramen.
"They acted just the way many young medical students do when facing it for the first time. This time, I imagine, they will be used to it.
