Button Surgery

Not only are needles and thread part of a surgeon's kit, but ordinary buttons, too. Their use in surgical repairs was described at a recent meeting of the New England Surgical Society by Dr. Radford C. Tanzer '25, Assistant Professor of Plastic Surgery at the Dartmouth Medical School.

In the surgical treatment of some types of injuries, there is the danger of pockets of blood forming from ruptured veins and clotting into a hardened mass. Called hematomas, they are often difficult to prevent. Dr. Tanzer, who has had years of practice in plastic surgery, including those in the Army Medical Corps during the war, has found that the use of buttons, which can be sewn to back-to-back surfaces, is a most effective preventive measure. He has sewed on buttons in 22 cases and in only one of these did a hematoma result. He has also used buttons to prevent hemorrhage when the surgical area is around the ears, lips or cheeks.

In a "compression suture" on the hand, a button may be put into the palm, another on the back of the hand, and the buttons sewn together, right through the hand. In one case, that of an 8-year-old girl who had mangled her hand in a washing machine, a flap of skin was raised from the child's abdomen and grafted by means of buttons to the injured palm of her hand. When the palm was cut loose from the abdomen, the girl had a repaired and useful hand.

Graduating from Dartmouth at 19 with Phi Beta Kappa rank, Dr. Tanzer received the M.D. degree from Harvard in 1929. A founding member of the American Board of Plastic Surgery, he is the author of several articles on his specialty. He is a plastic surgeon at the Hitchcock Clinic and the Veterans Hospital at White River Junction, Vt.