In June 1944 at the D-Day beach landings, Dwight Harken was brought a dying soldier with a gaping injury to his sternum and ribs. The heart's right ventricle lies directly behind the sternum, Nature's impenetrable bony shield. Ancients saw Nature's logic. The word sternum descends from the Greek word sternon, meaning a soldier's breastplate. As his assistants used retractors to widen Harken's field of view within the chest cavity, he saw shrapnel had penetrated the right ventricle.
Heart Healers ; D-D Landings
June 6, 1944: Members of an American landing party assist troops whose landing craft was sunk by enemy fire off Omaha beach, near Colleville sur Mer, France. Image is in the public domain via ibtimes.co.uk
For days and weeks leading up to this moment Harken had imagined his every move. First, he placed sutures in a complete circle around the point of shrapnel entry. Harken tried to grasp the end of the protruding fragment of shrapnel, with a clamp (called a hemostat). The ragged sliver of gunmetal bobbed back and forth continuously with each heartbeat, insolently waving at him, a metronome counting down the solder's remaining hours, death by bleeding or by infection. When Harken succeeded in clamping on to the evasive shard, the two men were linked by the soldier's only possible bridge to survival, Harken's hemostat. I can only imagine myself with my own hand on Harken's clamp.
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