In October 1930, a young surgical resident sat vigil as a patient with a blood clot in her pulmonary artery labored to breathe. The surgery she needed had never been successfully performed in the United States. Developed in Germany, the "Trendelenburg operation" had a 6 percent survival rate. After seventeen hours, it was clear the patient was not going to survive without surgery, so, with nothing to lose, the procedure was successfully carried out, but the patient died.
For the next twenty-three years, Dr. John Heysham Gibbon (1903-1973) and his wife Mary worked to produce a machine that could supply oxygenated blood while the heart was stopped. In 1935 he used a prototype heart-lung bypass machine to keep a cat alive for twenty-six minutes. Venous blood was fed into the machine where it was spun over a cylinder to provide oxygen/and then pumped back into an artery.
Many improvements were made, and in 1951 the first coronary artery bypass on a human being was performed, although the patient died. Fifteen months later, on May 6, 1953, an eighteen-year-old girl's heart function was replaced for twenty-six minutes with Gibbon's machine while a large hole in her heart was repaired. She is known to have survived for at least another thirty years.
Although this version was only used a few times, improved Gibbon machines and other models have enabled surgeons to perform many operations using cardiopulmonary bypass to correct heart defects, replace heart valves, and repair aortic aneurysms.
Gibbon, the pioneering heart surgeon, died of a heart attack in 1973.
