1955. An exhibit was shown to the assembled guests at the meeting of the Moscow Surgical Society. It was a surgery nobody had thought of. A large white dog was brought in the platform.
The dog looked happy, cheerfully wagging its tail, and [unintimidated] by the large crowd of eager guests in front of him. He seemed particularly unconcerned by the unnatural appendage protruding from the side of his neck.
The unnatural appendage was a tiny head of a brown-haired puppy, which was attached to the white dog by the Soviet scientist Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov a few days before the meeting.
Both the hound and the decapitated head of the puppy were alive and reacting to stimuli. And even as the surgeons watched, the puppy's head gave the ear of its host a nasty bite. The white head snarled.
But why would Demikhov create such a “medical monstrosity”, you might ask? The answer is, because he had a vision for the future.
“The final goal of our experiments was to make transplantation of the heart and other organs in humans possible,” Demikhov wrote in a monograph.
Throughout his life, he has made invaluable early contributions to coronary surgery. Unfortunately, he usually doesn’t get the recognition he very much deserves, as he is just mostly known as the scientist who conducted two-headed dog experiments.
In 1937, at the age of only 21 and still a student, the young Vladimir had shocked his professors by creating the first artificial heart, which he successfully implanted into a dog. The dog survived for five hours. After graduation, Demikhov continued his experimental research, eventually performing successful heart and lung transplants, and later, liver and kidney transplantation on dogs and cats.
If there was a man deserving to be “The Father of Heart and Lung of Transplantation”, it would be Demikhov, according to Doctor Christiaan Barnard, the man who performed the world’s first successful heart transplant in 1967.
More about Demikhov’s life over at Amusing Planet.
(Image Credit: Amusing Planet)