star crossed lindbergh carrel
In 1974, Paris renamed a tiny street near the Eiffel Tower after the French-American surgeon Alexis Carrel, winner of the 1912 Nobel Prize for developing new tissue culture methods and techniques for sewing blood vessels together.
http://www.amazon.com/Immortalists-Charles-Lindbergh-Alexis-Forever/dp/0060528168/ref=pd_sim_b_5
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1912 was awarded to Alexis Carrel "in recognition of his work on vascular suture and the transplantation of blood vessels and organs".
How do you suppose Charles Lindbergh managed to fly the Atlantic? So much is said about his courage and determination. He had rare nerve, no doubt. But not enough is said about his mind. Lindbergh did what others couldn’t do because he knew machines. He had a big hand in designing the highly specialized Spirit of St. Louis that took him to France.
We’ve all but forgotten the medical work Lindbergh did a few years later. In 1930 a relative suffered heart trouble. Doctors couldn’t operate without stopping the heart, but that would kill him. That struck Lindbergh as a solvable problem. So he talked to Alexis Carrel, who held the Nobel Prize for his work in organ transplants and suturing blood vessels.
Carrel was respected, but he was odd. His operating room was solid black. So was operating room dress. Author Christopher Hallowell tells us that he "flirted with arcane mysticism" and that he harbored bizzare racial theories. Well, Lindbergh was an odd enough duck himself. He alienated people before the war with his isolationist ideas. In any case, the two took a real shine to each other.
