Clarence Walton Lillehei

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Clarence Walton Lillehei (also: C. Walton Lillehei ; born October 23, 1918 in Minneapolis , † July 5, 1999 in St. Paul ) was an American surgeon . He performed the world's first open heart operations in the 1950s , making him one of the most outstanding doctors in the history of surgery and a co-founder of cardiac and thoracic surgery . In 1955 he received the Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research .

Life

Clarence Walton Lillehei was born in Minneapolis in 1918 and studied at the University of Minnesota , where he earned a bachelor's degree (BS) in 1939 and completed his medical degree in 1942 . After a service in the US Army medical service in Europe during World War II , he returned to the University of Minnesota in 1945, where he completed his practical training. In 1949 he became a lecturer in surgery at the university's medical faculty. A year later he was diagnosed with lymphosarcoma with a five-year survival rate of only five to ten percent. He underwent surgical treatment and subsequent radiation therapy and survived the disease. In 1951 he received a Masters Degree (MS) in Physiology and a Ph. D. in Surgery . He then worked at the University of Minnesota until 1967 as a professor of surgery and developed a special interest in the field of cardiac surgery .

In the first half of the 1950s, Lillehei made medical history with several groundbreaking heart surgeries . On September 2, 1952, he participated in the world's first hypothermia assisted open heart surgery , directed by his colleague F. John Lewis . However, this surgical technique has proven to be inadequate for the treatment of complicated congenital heart defects. On March 26, 1954, Lillehei carried out the first heart operation on a boy whose heart was defective in the ventricular septum, in which the patient's blood circulation and oxygen supply were carried out using a technique known as cross circulation . The boy's blood was pumped into his father's femoral vein , from where it was enriched with oxygen and returned to the boy's carotid artery . This procedure, which lasted a total of 19 minutes, enabled the heart to be surgically treated without hypothermia and without the use of a heart-lung machine . Although the operation was successful in correcting the heart defect, the boy died of pneumonia eleven days later .

Using this technique, Lillehei operated on 45 patients with otherwise untreatable heart defects, most of whom were younger than two years, over the next 15 months, saving the lives of 32 of them. These included the first successfully treated patients with an atrioventricular septal defect and with Fallot's tetralogy . Even if cross circulation was not widely used because of the associated risks for the donor and because of the development of a practical heart-lung machine, Lillehei and three colleagues from his team ( Herbert E. Warden , Morley Cohen , Richard L. Varco ) for this pioneering act the Albert Lasker Award for clinical-medical research , which is considered the highest medical-scientific award in the United States . He is also the recipient of the Gairdner Foundation International Award (1963).

Further breakthroughs in the field of cardiac surgery, with a significant contribution from Lillehei, were the development and use of the first pacemaker in 1958 and the development and use of the first artificial heart valves . In addition, he worked on the further development of the heart-lung machine and the optimization of the targeted use of hypothermia in cardiac surgery. In 1967 he moved to Cornell University , where he took over the management of the surgical department and, among other things , dealt with the simultaneous transplantation of several organs . Eight years later he returned to the University of Minnesota. However, due to increasing vision problems from his previous radiation treatment, he was forced to quit his practice as a surgeon at the age of 55. From then on he worked primarily in the field of training and consulting. In 1979 he became medical director for the heart valve division of St. Jude Medical .

The doctors he trained included the South African heart surgeon Christiaan Barnard , who performed the world's first heart transplant in 1967 , and the American Norman Shumway , who repeated this operation in the United States a year later. Lillehei died of prostate cancer in 1999 at the age of 80 in St. Paul , leaving behind his wife, with whom he was married for 52 years and had a daughter and three sons. The Lillehei Heart Institute at the University of Minnesota is named after him. On the occasion of his 70th birthday, the "C. Walton and Richard C. Lillehei Chair for Cardiovascular Surgery "(English C. Walton and Richard C. Lillehei Professorship in Cardiovascular Surgery ) established. His brother Richard Lillehei , who also worked as a surgeon and worked at the University of Minnesota, made a name for himself in the field of organ transplantation and carried out the first pancreas transplant on a patient in 1966 .

literature

  • Denton A. Cooley: In Memoriam. C. Walton Lillehei, the "Father of Open Heart Surgery". In: Circulation. 100/1999. American Heart Association, pp. 1364-1365, ISSN  0009-7322
  • Sylvester Black, R. Morton Bolman III: C. Walton Lillehei and the Birth of Open Heart Surgery. In: Journal of Cardiac Surgery. 21 (2) / 2006. Blackwell Publishing, pp. 205-208, ISSN  0886-0440
  • Wayne G. Miller: King of Hearts: The True Story of the Maverick Who Pioneered Open Heart Surgery. Three Rivers Press, New York 2000, ISBN 0-609-80724-2
  • Daniel A. Goor: The Genius of C. Walton Lillehei and the True History of Open Heart Surgery. Vantage Press, New York 2007, ISBN 0-533-15557-6
  • C. Walton Lillehei , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 46/1999 of November 8, 1999, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of the article freely available)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Lillehei, Clarence Walton
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lillehei, C. Walton
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American surgeon and founder of cardiac surgery
DATE OF BIRTH October 23, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Minneapolis
DATE OF DEATH July 5, 1999
Place of death Saint Paul, Minnesota