1. The last remaining Quonset hut on the site of the US 160th General Hospital in Gloucestershire. During the Second World War Dwight Harken used one of these ramshackle buildings as an operating theatre, removing shrapnel fragments from the hearts of more than 50 soldiers without a single death.
2. Alfred Blalock (centre) performs a Blue Baby operation at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Vivien Thomas is standing behind him.
3. Michael Schirmer, aged five, with Anna the experimental dog. Schirmer lived for another 69 years after undergoing the Blue Baby operation in 1945.
4. The heart of King George II, who died suddenly while using the royal lavatory in 1760. The dark area visible at the base of the largest blood vessel, the aorta, is the catastrophic rupture believed to have killed him.
5. Michael DeBakey, one of the most innovative and prominent figures in cardiac surgery, whose extraordinary surgical career spanned more than six decades.
6. C. Walton Lillehei (left, wearing headlamp) performs open-heart surgery in 1954 using cross-circulation. The life of his five-month-old patient, Marsha Gilliam, is being sustained by the heart and lungs of her mother on the right. Marsha is still alive at the time of writing.
7. A patient being cooled to 28°C in an ice bath in preparation for hypothermic open-heart surgery at the US National Institutes of Health in 1955.
8. John Gibbon with the second model of the Gibbon–IBM heart-lung machine.
9. Philip Amundson, the first patient to receive a Starr–Edwards artificial valve, examining the simple device that saved his life.
10. The world’s first implantable pacemaker, constructed by Rune Elmqvist and implanted in 1958. It was approximately 55mm in diameter and 25mm thick – the dimensions of the shoe polish tin Elmqvist used to encase it in plastic.
11. Left to right: the surgeon Åke Senning, Rune Elmqvist and Arne Larsson, the recipient of the first implantable pacemaker, at a reunion marking the twentieth anniversary of the operation.
12. The world’s most famous patient: Louis Washkansky is examined by Christiaan Barnard shortly after receiving a new heart in December 1967.
13. A relaxed Christiaan Barnard faces the press. His charisma and good looks helped make him the instantly recognisable poster boy for the early transplant era.
14. Gerald Scarfe’s uncompromising take on Barnard’s feat articulates the fears of many who saw organ transplantation as a modern form of bodysnatching.
The cartoon’s captions read: Patient: But Doctor – I don’t think I’m dead. Doctor: Don’t worry you soon will be.
The placard on the patient’s bed reads: Symptoms
Sore Finger
15. Michael DeBakey (front right) during the operation to implant an LVAD into Marcel DeRudder in April 1966. Such groundbreaking and complex procedures often involved a huge team of specialists.
16. Haskell Karp, the recipient of the first total artificial heart. The control console for the device is on the right.
17. The artificial heart that was implanted into Haskell Karp by Denton Cooley on 4 April 1969. The original device is now in the collections of the National Museum of American History in Washington, D. C.
18. ‘Even though I have an artificial heart, I still love you.’ Barney Clark, the first recipient of a permanent artificial heart, with his wife Una Loy. He survived for 112 days after implantation.
19. Andreas Grüntzig brandishing the balloon catheter he invented in 1977, which made it possible to perform percutaneous interventions on the coronary arteries. Grüntzig and his wife both died in 1985 when the light aircraft he was piloting crashed during a storm. He was 46, and his wife only 29.
20. Robotic cardiac surgery in progress at Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. The surgeon, Dr Emmanuel Moss, sitting at the console on the far left, controls the plastic-covered robotic arms above the operating table in the centre of the picture.
