1929

Australian physician and anesthetist Mark Lidwill presents to Australasian Medical Congress on pacemaker intended to revive surgical patients whose heart stops while under general anesthesia; also in 1929, Albert Hyman, NYC cardiologist, makes seminar presentation proposing the concept of pacing the heart by pulsed electrical stimuli; his own pacemaker, designed with brother Charles, relied on a spring-driven mechanism to provide six minutes of pulsing current. It was also intended to resuscitate intact heart arrested through accidental causes and was announced in 1932 (Jeffrey, 27ff.). The Hyman pacemaker had technical problems, and Hyman was not well versed in electrical matters. Moreover, “No demand developed in the 1930s or the 1940s for an artificial pacemaker that would perform emergency resuscitation . . . electrotherapeutics had long been associated with medical quackery. . . . More broadly, the medical profession in the 1930s regarded cardiac arrest as an unusual and generally irreversible condition. Most doctors apparently considered it a hopeless situation when it occurred or believed that injections of stimulants stood as good a chance as anything to revive the stopped heart” (31-32).