1918

Alfred Hyman, then an intern in Boston, was desperate to understand why a patient in heart block whose heart was temporarily restarted with injections of adrenaline directly into the heart lapsed into heart block and died, and then at age 25, “he conceived the idea of an electrical stimulus conveyed to the heart muscle through a needle. . . Hyman constructed a machine which he called the ‘artificial pacemaker’. Like Lidwill’s device, it was intended as a temporary stand-in for the patient’s own sinoatrial node.” In 1936, he replaced his original bulky apparatus with a battery-powered model, but failed to find a manufacturer and faded into obscurity (Morse, loc 2730ff).