At Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital in 1930, a young surgeon named John Gibbon Jr. witnessed the death of a patient as a result of a massive pulmonary embolism, or a blood clot in his lung. Doctors tried for hours to save the patient with traditional surgical techniques, but failed—leaving a lifelong impression on Gibbon, who went on to develop the heart-lung machine that made possible open-heart surgery as we know it today.

Gibbon (1903–1973) left Boston soon after this incident and took a teaching position at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. There, he focused on developing a machine that could take over for the heart and lungs during surgery. He faced many challenges: how to drain the blood from the body, how to pump it back, how to keep it from clotting in the machine, and so on. Until this point in history, surgery on or around the heart was limited to what could be done while the heart was still beating, or what could be fixed in just a few minutes while the heart was stopped and the brain was deprived of oxygen.

The IBM Corporation helped Gibbon produce his first machine, which showed promise in animals but failed to pump enough blood for a human. Gibbon built a second machine in his lab and, in 1952, used it to operate on a 15-month-old girl. The patient died on the operating table, but his second operation, 3 months later, was a remarkable success and the patient made a full recovery after spending 27 minutes being kept alive by Gibbon’s machine.

Gibbon’s next two operations were unsuccessful, however, and he gave up performing open-heart surgery shortly thereafter. Mayo Clinic researchers, meanwhile, developed the first commercially available heart-lung machine, the Mayo-Gibbon device, modeled after Gibbon’s design. This machine (along with other advancements, such as cardiac catheterization and anticlotting medication) helped doctors begin to treat heart disease, one of the most common causes of death in the United Sates, as they never could before.

ADDITIONAL FACTS

  1. After being hooked to a heart-lung machine, patients often reported cognitive decline, a condition nicknamed pumphead. It was thought to be a temporary symptom of surgical trauma, but recent studies have found that it may actually persist and worsen over time. Microscopic cell debris and bubbles generated by the machine are possible causes.
  2. Before the heart-lung machine was perfected, surgeons experimented with hypothermia techniques: By cooling the patient’s body before surgery, they could slightly extend the amount of time the brain could go without oxygen.
  3. Gibbon was associated for most of his life with Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. He also held positions at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and as an Army doctor during World War II.