1955

John Kirklin at Mayo Clinic successfully repairs VSD of 5-year-old using his “Mayo-Gibbon” Wurlitzer-size heart-lung machine (Miller, 172-75); Walton Lillehei and Richard A. DeWall succeed on third try in July (first two tries led to postsurgical death within days) with a heart-lung machine, called a helix reservoir bubble oxygenator, which bubbled oxygen through the blood during an operation (176-80). Dewall’s oxygenator “consisted of a 60-centimeter vertical plastic cylinder; blood was pumped upwards through this column, while oxygen bubbles were injected into it through eighteen hypodermic syringes at the bottom. . . . The tubing – and the antifoaming agent with which it was treated – came from the dairy industry. . . . [Dewall’s oxygenator] was the kick-start that open-heart surgery needed” “ (Morris, loc 1990). Next major improvement in oxygenator came from Willem Kolff, the pioneer of kidney dialysis, who invented a new kind of machine in which blood was kept separate from the gas by a semi-permeable membrane through which gas exchange took place: “Kolff’s membrane oxygenator was not perfected until the 1970s, but thereafter became standard technology in heart surgery (loc 2007).