Bernard Lown

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Bernard Lown (2008)

Bernard Lown (born June 7, 1921 in Utena , Lithuania , † February 16, 2021 in Chestnut Hill , Massachusetts ) was an American cardiologist and activist of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), which he co-founded for which he and his Soviet colleague Yevgeny Tschasow accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 . As a cardiologist, he was the first to describe and one of the namesake of the Lown-Ganong-Levine syndrome, Developer of the Lown classification for ventricular extrasystoles , which has been used around the world for decades , inventor of electroshock treatment ( defibrillation and cardioversion ) for cardiac arrhythmias and founder of the Lown Cardiovascular Center at the Harvard Medical School of Harvard University in Cambridge (Massachusetts) .

Childhood, adolescence and studies

Bernard Lown was born Boruchas Lacas in Lithuania . His two grandfathers were rabbis . His father Nisonas Lacas worked in wholesale . Together with a business partner, he bought a flour mill in the early 1920s , for which a diesel unit with a generator was purchased. The electricity generated in this way also enabled the operation of a sawmill and the electricity supply for the residents of Utena . This gave the family material prosperity . His mother, Bela Lacas (née Hindi), was an educated woman who attended college in Russia . Works by Ivan Turgenev , Leo Tolstoy , Maxim Gorky, as well as French classics were read at home. Meetings of Zionists and cultural workers , readings , concerts and theater performances took place in the house of the Lacas family .

In the 1930s, the family made the decision to emigrate to the United States . Nisonas' brother Pilypas, who ran a shoe factory in the United States, had convinced him that his children had better prospects there than in Lithuania. In addition, the family made after the seizure of power of the Nazis in Germany worried about the growing danger of war. However, since at that time many people in the predominantly Jewish population of the city of Utena were considering emigration, it was very difficult to find a buyer for the family-owned company. When the family couldn't find a buyer after seven months of searching, they decided that Nisonas would leave for the United States with older children Boruchas and Hiršelė, while Bela would stay in Lithuania with younger children Moišelė and Liliana until the company was sold.

In March 1935, the first part of the family began their journey and settled in Lewiston (Maine) . After that, Bela Lacas felt depressed. She was overwhelmed with the management of the company and got into debt. Eventually she handed the company over to her husband's former business partners, who paid nothing for it, but settled their debts. In October 1936 she came to America with her children. The Lacas family changed their name to Lown. Bernard studied medicine at the University of Maine and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University . He left the latter in 1945 as a medical doctor (MD) . During his studies, he got involved in groups that demanded increased admission of black, female and Jewish medical students and were viewed as “left-wing”. Because of a disregard for the segregated use of “black” and “white” blood supplies, he was temporarily suspended from academic classes.

training

After completing his studies, Lown initially worked for five years in various clinics, before devoting himself to cardiological research from 1950 to 1953 at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston.

As a military doctor with the rank of captain, before a planned deployment in Korea , Lown refused the legally required answer to the question whether he had belonged to one of 400 organizations that were classified as subversive at the time . Instead, he advocated the abolition of these discriminatory laws, which led to demotion and transfer to a military hospital in Tacoma, Washington , in the McCarthy era , which was marked by anti - communism . There he spent 1954 sweeping the hospital corridors in the mornings and holding consultations in the afternoons. About that time he later said, "It ruined my life for a year and delayed my career for a decade, but it made me a better doctor." Assistant positions followed at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (1955-1956) and Harvard Medical School (1955 to 1958).

Career as a doctor and scientist

At Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (later Brigham and Women's Hospital ), Lown was director of the Samuel A. Levine Cardiovascular Research Laboratory from 1956 to 1970, director of the Samuel A. Levine Coronary Care Unit from 1965 to 1974 and senior physician from 1984 . He taught at the Harvard School of Public Health from 1961 to 1967 as Assistant Professor of Medicine , 1967 to 1974 as Associate Professor of Cardiology and from 1974 as Professor of Cardiology . In 1991 he retired .

Lown described in 1952 for the first time one of the Präexzitations syndrome that has since Lown-Ganong-Levine syndrome is called, and coined the term in 1962 sick sinus syndrome ( sinus node syndrome ). He introduced lidocaine therapy for ventricular extrasystoles and in 1971 developed the Lown classification of ventricular extrasystoles.

Electroshock treatment for atrial fibrillation (cardioversion) was developed by Lown and his colleagues in the early 1960s and first published in 1962. It was initially controversially discussed in specialist circles, but gained acceptance worldwide and is still used hundreds of thousands of times. The concept of coronary care units , the continuous monitoring of the heart rhythm ("EKG monitoring ") in coronary patients, was proposed by Lown and implemented for the first time.

Lown has authored or co-authored four books and more than 425 publications in scientific journals. He has received more than 20 honorary doctorates and degrees from US and international universities and academies. Since 2014 he has been a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences .

Political activities

In 1974 and 1975, Lown chaired the USA-China Physicians Friendship Association .

IPPNW

As a result of several joint research projects, Lown maintained good contacts with the Russian cardiologist Yevgeny Tschasow, to whom in 1979 he submitted the proposal for an international association of Doctors for Peace.

In 1980 they founded the organization International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). Initially, there were a few doctors who met in the Lowns' living room. They planned to involve colleagues from the USA, the Soviet Union and Japan. In 1985, when the association received the Nobel Peace Prize, there were already 200,000 members from 60 countries.

The US media response to the award of the Nobel Prize was controversial in 1985. In a later interview in 2005, Lown recalled his reluctance to open the papers or give interviews on the occasion of the Nobel Prize. Some media have commented very negatively and, among other things. Chazov accused of murder. While he was still on the way to Norway, Lown was worried because the Nobel Committee had wanted to suspend the award ceremony, according to a radio message. On arrival in Norway, Lown, his mother and his wife were met by the police and had to wait. Since the policemen did not speak English and the Lowns did not speak Norwegian, an explanation was not possible. Lown was already thinking that the report would prove to be true and that it would be sent back. Only after an hour did the Nobel Committee appear with flowers and greet them warmly. As it turned out, the Lowns had arrived earlier than expected because they had landed in a patient's private jet an hour before the scheduled scheduled flight. He didn't want to go through that hour again, Lown later reported.

Lown was also disappointed that no official US representative was present at the award ceremony. Later, the two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling wrote to him : “Lown, don't be upset. They didn't come for my Nobel either. "(" Don't be disappointed, Lown. They didn't come to my Nobel either. ")

The award ceremony took place on December 10, 1985.

"Building on their realistic evaluation of the situation, these physicians have chosen to stand shoulder to shoulder and to work together in a cooperation founded on trust and confidence. The Nobel Committee believes this was a good decision. ”(Egil Aarvik, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee )
(“ Based on their realistic assessment of the situation, these doctors have decided to stand shoulder to shoulder and together in a one based on trust and confidence To work in cooperation. The Nobel Prize Committee thinks this was a good decision. ")

Lown and Tschasow received the award in Oslo for the organization. Lown was President of IPPNW from 1980 to 1982 and Co-President from 1982 to 1993. In 1987 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

SatelLife

The founding of SatelLife can also be traced back to an initiative by Lown, who intended to create a symbolic counterweight to global military defense strategies . SatelLife is a Boston- based non-profit organization that aims to provide low-cost Internet access for healthcare workers worldwide, thereby promoting collegial contact and access to relevant information. Initially, the main activity was to build one of the first e-mail networks in Africa with its own satellite. Today, The Global Health Information Network focuses on training its more than 10,000 members, mainly in Eritrea , Ethiopia , Kenya , Nepal , Uganda and Zimbabwe , and equipping them with hardware and software to provide them with information and contacts to specialists at all times can.

Criticism of health care

Since the 1980s, Lown dealt increasingly with what he saw as the unfavorable increasing commercialization of the American health care system and campaigned against the billing policy with flat rates and DRG . He advocated more social medicine and a health system that should primarily serve the patient rather than technology and profit. In this context, he founded the association Ad Hoc Committee to Defend Health Care and published many articles and letters to the editor in specialist journals that were directed against the use of too much technology and too little “medical art”. In 1996 the now retired 75-year-old Lown published the book "The Lost Art of Healing" , in which he presented his view of the healing art in great detail and criticized the loss of this art in today's medicine. The book has been translated into many languages ​​including The second German-language edition was published in 2004 with the title “The lost art of healing. Instructions to rethink. " . A review in the Deutsches Ärzteblatt describes the work as "exceptionally exciting and instructive" and recommends giving it to every student at the beginning of their medical studies and having them discussed again at the end of their studies, "so that what ultimately constitutes a medical practice is not lost".

Private

Bernard Lown was married to Louise Charlotte Lown from 1946 and had three children. He died in February 2021 at the age of 99.

literature

  • Bernard Lown, E. Chazov: Cooperation Not Confrontation: The Imperative of a Nuclear Age. The Message From Budapest. In: Journal of the American Medical Association. Volume 254, 1985, p. 655.
  • G. Warner, M. Shulman: Citizen Diplomats. New York 1986, ISBN 0-8264-0382-4 , p. 31.
  • Eberhard J. Wormer : Syndromes of cardiology and their creators. Munich 1989, ISBN 3-923866-28-3 , pp. 159-168.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c E. Kutka: Uteniškis - Nobeliopremijos laureatas. In: Naujoji Romuva. No. 2 (595), 2016, pp. 66-74. ( online , accessed February 17, 2021)
  2. ↑ a b W. Bertram: About the author. In: B. Lown: The Lost Art of Healing . Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 2004, ISBN 3-518-45574-5 , pp. 394-397.
  3. ^ B. Lown, WF Ganong, SA Levine: The Syndrome of Short PR Interval, Normal QRS Complex and Paroxysmal Rapid Heart Action. In: Circulation. Vol. 5, No. 5, 1952, p. 693. PMID 14926053
  4. ↑ B. Lown, M. Wolf: Approaches to sudden death from coronary heart disease. In: Circulation. Volume 44, No. 1, 1971, pp. 130-142. PMID 4104697 .
  5. ↑ B. Lown, R. Amarasingham, J. Neuman: New method for terminating cardiac arrhythmias. Use of synchronized capacitor discharge. In: JAMA. Volume 182, 1962, pp. 548-555. PMID 13931298 .
  6. ^ ME Silverman: History and personal observations of electrical cardioversion of atrial fibrillation. In: Am J Cardiol. Volume 94, 2004, pp. 751-752. PMID 15462040 .
  7. ^ B. Lown et al .: The coronary care unit. New perspectives and directions. In: JAMA. Volume 199, 1967, pp. 188-198. PMID 6071172 .
  8. ^ B. Lown, MD Klein, PI Hershberg: Coronary and precoronary care. In: Am J Med. Volume 46, 1969, pp. 705-724. PMID 4898363 .
  9. ↑ Foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences: Лаун, Бернард. Russian Academy of Sciences, accessed April 2, 2021 (in Russian).
  10. ↑ a b c Quoted from: M. Yokota: Nuclear War, Hope for the Future, and the Power of Connectivity. An interview with Bernard Lown . Boston Research Center Resources, 2005. ( accessed online ( July 5, 2008 memento on the Internet Archive ) June 24, 2006)
  11. ^ The Nobel Peace Prize 1985 - Presentation Speech ( online , accessed June 7, 2021)
  12. ^ B. Lown: The tyranny of technology. In: Hosp Pract. (Minneap) Vol. 32, 1997, p. 25. PMID 9153135 .
  13. ↑ M. Elzer: Encounter with the patient. In: Deutsches Ärzteblatt . Volume 102, 2005, pp. A-3020
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on July 4, 2006 .
personal data
SURNAME Lown, Bernard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American cardiologist and peace activist
DATE OF BIRTH June 7, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Utena , Lithuania
DATE OF DEATH February 16, 2021
PLACE OF DEATH Chestnut Hill , Massachusetts