Boston doctors reattach the severed arm of an injured boy. It is the first successful reattachment of a human limb.
Red Knowles had been trying to hop a freight train and was thrown against a stone wall that ripped his right arm off cleanly at the shoulder. Knowles walked away from the tracks, using his left hand to hold his right arm inside a bloody sleeve. A police ambulance rushed the twelve-year-old to Massachusetts General Hospital, where emergency-room staff discovered the extent of his injury.
Surgeons had attached partly severed limbs before but never had the ideal candidate for a complete reimplantation, or replantation. Mass General’s thirty-year-old chief surgical resident, Dr. Ronald Malt, ordered Knowles’s arm put on ice, and he assembled the team of experts he needed.
In hours of surgery, twelve doctors reconnected the blood vessels, pinned the arm bone, and grafted skin and muscle together. All the techniques had been used before, but never all at once to save an entire limb. To everyone’s delight, Knowles’s hand turned pink, and a pulse returned to the wrist.
Doctors waited until September to reattach four major nerve trunks. Within weeks, Knowles was complaining of severe pain in the arm, which in the unusual circumstances was a good sign. A year later, Knowles’s arm and fingers were sensitive to heat, cold, and touch, and he could move his fingers and bend his wrist. He could also play first base, but only with his left hand. The next year he was playing tennis and more baseball. After four years of recovery, Knowles had the same use of his right arm and hand as a natural lefty. He eventually drove a six-wheel truck and lifted sides of beef at his job.—RA