science · 05 February 1973 · 51 years ago
death
Died 5 Feb 1973 at age 69 (born 29 Sep 1903).
John Heyburn Gibbon was an American surgeon who invented the heart-lung machine. He was prompted when in 1930, as a Harvard research fellow in surgery, he saw a patient undergoing heart-lung surgery suffocate on his own blood. On 10 May 1935, he had built his first external pump, and was able to maintain the cardiac and respiratory functions of a cat. In the late 1940's, Gibbon received financial and technical assistance from the IBM Corporation to develop an oxygenator with sufficient capacity for a human. By 6 May 1953, with his improved machine he was able to perform the first successful open-heart operation - the repair of an atrial septal defect on 18-yr-old Cecelia Bavolek - maintaining the patient's heart and lung functions on the machine for 26 minutes.
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