Image credit: Heart Transplant Surgery, Wellcome Trust
We were thrilled to open our 45th lecture season with "The Daring Young Surgeons Who Pioneered Heart Surgery" by David Cooper, MD (Co-Director, Xenotransplantation Program, Department of Surgery, University of Alabama at Birmingham). This was the April 2020 Ravitch Lecture, rescheduled and held via Zoom due to the pandemic.
Heart surgery was one of the greatest advances in medicine during the latter part of the 20th century. The surgeons who contributed to it include some of the most interesting personalities you could ever expect to meet.
It evolved from "closed" heart surgery, where the surgeon worked blindly only by touch, through "open" heart surgery with the brain protected by hypothermia, to patients supported by the heart-lung machine. It culminated in heart transplantation and the total replacement of the heart by a mechanical device. All of these advances took place within a period of about 50 years.
The presentation concentrated as much on the personal stories of the surgeons as on the contributions they made. You can watch it here.
Two notes: 1) The actual introductions and lecture content begin at 22:47. The lecture and Q&A afterward run just over 1 hour 30 minutes.
2) Dr. Cooper offered the 31st annual Mark M. Ravitch History of Medicine lecture, co-sponsored by the Department of Surgery of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Dr. Ravitch received his MD degree from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and took his surgical residency training at that institution. For twenty years he served as professor in the Department of Surgery of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and was Surgeon-in-Chief at Montefiore Hospital. Among his many contributions to the field of surgery were the advances he pioneered in the correction of chest wall deformities. Even with his hectic surgical work schedule Dr. Ravitch found time to be a major contributor to the scholarship in the history of surgery. His landmark 2 volume text, A Century of Surgery: The History of the American Surgical Association, remains the landmark work in this area of scholarship. Dr. Ravitch was also an international level bibliophile and rare book collector. He left the Health Sciences Library System of the University of Pittsburgh’s rare book collection a truly lasting legacy, as we serve as the custodians of his world class collection of 491 original titles on the history of hernia repair, from the mid-16th century through the first third of the 20th century. For all these reasons we were honored to celebrate his memory and to continue his pursuit of history of surgery knowledge and education.
Anthony Constantinou | Anthony Constantinou CEO CWM FX says Indeed good to hear that you have had a successful heart transplant. Today the survival rates after a heart transplant are going due to the new advancement in technology. Most patients are successfully returns to their work and lead active lives.
ReplyDeleteI have had a lifelong fascination with resource intense innovations that never really panned out. In the early 1970s Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, Illinois had a grand epiphany that heart surgery conducted inside a hyperbaric chamber would be a real boon to patient outcomes. A 3 story structure resembling a 747 hangar was constructed on hospital grounds to accommodate the PAT bus sized hyperbaric chamber.
ReplyDeleteNow for the fun part; how do you operate a heart/lung machine inside an oxygen filled cylinder? A hydraulically driven pump was designed with the electrical pumps outside the massive cylinder and the only connection inside the cylinder were the hoses to drive the impellers.
Hemostasis was another problem-no cautery inside the cylinder so bleeders were tied off and liberal amounts of flaked Gelfoam were used on pleura.
Today the cardiac OR in the hyperbaric chamber has been replaced by EZ boy recliners to accommodate 8 patients at a time for such mundane ministrations like treating leg ulcers!