Early Development
A heart-lung machine was used in 1953 during a successful open heart surgery. Dr. John Heysham Gibbon, the inventor of the machine, performed the operation and developed the heart-lung substitute himself.
Although Jarvik created the idea and rough draft for the artificial heart, his models were not created of a material that the human body would accept. Dayton, Ohio's Ival O. Salyer, along with various colleagues, developed a polymer material that the human body would not necessarily reject.
On July 3, 1952, 41-year-old Henry Opitek, suffering from shortness of breath, made medical history at Harper University Hospital at Wayne State University in Michigan. The Dodrill-GMR heart machine, considered to be the first operational mechanical heart, was successfully used while performing heart surgery.
Dr. Forest Dewey Dodrill used the machine in 1952 to bypass Henry Opitek's left ventricle for 50 minutes while he opened the patient's left atrium and worked to repair the mitral valve. In Dr. Dodrill's post-operative report, he notes, "To our knowledge, this is the first instance of survival of a patient when a mechanical heart mechanism was used to take over the complete body function of maintaining the blood supply of the body while the heart was open and operated on."
The scientific interest for the development of a solution for heart disease developed in different research groups worldwide.
Read more about this topic: Artificial Heart
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