1925

Sergei Brukhonenko invents a heart-lung machine, the “autojector,” that anticipates John Gibbon’s heart-lung machine of 1953. It used two pumps to push deoxygenated blood through the lungs of a recently killed dog; the lungs were attached to bellows to simulate breathing; The blood passed through the dog lung was collected and used to perfuse a living animal, and then through the severed head of a dog. In 1926, he became “the first to achieve total cardiopulmonary bypass” by attaching the autojector to major blood vessels of a dying dog; the machine kept the dog alive for two hours before it died from unexpected bleeding (Morris, loc. 1647ff.)