1935

John Gibbon, assisted by wife Marty, has first successful demonstration of their first heart-lung machine in their home lab using a cat, which they kept alive almost four hours (elsewhere 2 hr 51 min) while its pulmonary artery was obstructed: “We finally found that it was possible, using the extra corporeal circulation, to completely occlude the pulmonary artery without any change in the blood pressure or respirations. Such a result had always been secretly hoped for but never admitted. When we did succeed, we were filled with joy and astonishment and danced around the laboratory in glee” (Gibbon, 613). In 1939 Gibbon announces to surgical conference that four cats were kept alive by the machine for up to 20 minutes had all made complete recoveries (Morris, loc 1704ff.). After returning from service in WWII in 1945, one of his med students introduced to Thomas J. Watson, who agreed to construct a heart-lung machine at IBM’s expense (loc 1730). The first IBM-built machine (the Model I)was delivered to Gibbon at Jefferson Hospital in Phila in 1947, and in 1949 he announced that he now saw the machine as a means of enabling open-heart surgery (Morris, loc 1704ff.). Problems addressed by IBM optimizing flow oxygenator by introducing turbulence into the stream to increase oxygenation and replacing cylindrical design with design that included six steel screens suspended from wires (Bauer). First successful use of the machine, following two failures unrelated to the machine, was on 6 May 1953; patient was 18-year-old Cecelia Bevlek, had a silver-dollar size atrial septic defect (Morris, loc 1763ff.).