Dr. Henry Frankenstein
was quite ahead of his time…his whole notion of making a living being out of
the parts of cadavers…we’re not quite there yet, but there are amazing advances
that have been made in terms of fingers being reconnected…arms or legs being
reattached…eyes being used to make a person see again…faces being ‘made’ or
replaced…why there is even talk of a head being attached to a different body
and they say even such a thing like that is not far away…that brings us to
reattaching body parts that have accidentally been severed…medical personnel
have said a severed body part should be sealed in a plastic bag and placed on
ice…any direct contact with ice can cause frostbite and damage the very tissue
you are trying to save…of course not all body parts are the same…muscle usually
has a faster metabolism, hence a severed arm or leg will deteriorate quicker
than a finger…in the movie ‘House of Frankenstein’, Boris Karloff who plays a
doctor speaks of tissue deterioration after the monster is melted out of an ice
block…of course I would guess that the monster would have had some form of
frostbite being frozen, but…usually full limbs must be reattached within
somewhere between 5-10 hours…cartilage on the other hand has a slow metabolism,
so severed ears or a severed nose can last longer…the first step when one is
reattaching a body part (don’t try this at home) is to reconnect the arteries
so that blood can flow to the reattached part…for such a procedure to work
properly, the severed tissue must still be alive (ITS ALIVE! ITS ALIVE!), and
the severed arteries must be large enough to lend themselves to the use of
micro-surgical techniques…of course the veins must be reattached…I bet you
didn’t know that when veins can’t be sewn up right away, they use live
leeches…they have something in their saliva that prevents blood from clotting
and lets the blood continue to flow…obviously, the cleaner the cut, the easier
(if that’s the word) the operation…even then, nothing is a sure thing, but it
is amazing that such things can be attempted and do work.
