In the 1950s, surgeons were working hard on correcting heart problems. A big stumbling block was the surgery itself- namely, keeping the patient alive long enough to do the repairs. One such patient was Stephen Joseph Brabeck, born in 1950 with tetralogy of Fallot, a cluster of four heart defects. That was unfortunate, but he was lucky to be born when he was, and in Minnesota, where cutting-edge heart research was happening.
In 1954 at the University of Minnesota, Dr. C. Walton Lillehei started using another human being (generally the patient’s parent) as a surrogate heart-lung machine, linking the patient and parent together during the operation. The controversial procedure risked two lives during a single operation, but Lillehei went on to perform 45 procedures in the early 1950s—with a 40 percent mortality rate for patients.
Meanwhile, just 10 miles away at the Mayo Cinic, Dr. John H. Kirklin pursued a mechanical solution that had so far proved elusive. As a medical student, he had long dreamed of the possibilities of open-heart surgery, including a treatment for the very ailment afflicting Brabeck. In a paper he co-authored on the first 50 years of open-heart surgery, Dr. Richard C. Daly, a Mayo cardiovascular surgeon, related comments Kirklin later made about the challenges of open-heart surgery in the 1940s and 1950s: “My fellow residents and I filled pages of notebooks with drawings and plans of how we would close ventricular septal defects and repair the tetralogy of Fallot once science gave us a method to get inside the heart.”
Kirklin assembled a team to come up with a mechanical life-saving device, and in 1955, 5-year-old Brabeck was one of the first humans to test the Mayo-Gibbon heart-lung machine while undergoing heart surgery. Read the story of the revolutionary machine and the little boy who grow up to be a cardiologist at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: National Museum of American History)