F. John Lewis

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Floyd John Lewis (born November 26, 1916 - September 20, 1993 in Santa Barbara, California ) was an American surgeon . He performed the first successful open heart surgery at the University of Minnesota in 1952 .

Lewis became Instructur in 1950, Assistant Professor in 1951, Clinical Associate Professor in 1952, and Associate Professor of Surgery in 1954 at the University of Minnesota.

Lewis was a close friend of Clarence Walton Lillehei at the University of Minnesota, who and his team worked on innovations in cardiac surgery such as hypothermia in the early 1950s .

On September 2, 1952, Lewis performed the first successful open heart surgery on a five-year-old girl who had a hole in the septum of the heart ( atrial septal defect , ASD). His team cut off the blood supply to the heart and cooled the patient to 80 degrees Fahrenheit to minimize oxygen consumption, which gave them a ten-minute window for surgery. He performed 59 more ASD surgeries before leaving the University of Minnesota in 1956. The team from Lillehei was able to carry out more complex operations with a technique known as "Cross Circulation", which circumvented the use of a heart-lung machine that was not yet available at the time and was carried out for the first time in 1954.

In 1956, he went to Northwestern University as the first full-time faculty member. After he was passed over in the appointment of the chair of surgery, he went into early retirement in 1976 and moved to California. There he wrote about bike tours around Santa Barbara, mountain hiking and climbing.

Thomas Starzl was one of his students at Northwestern University .

literature

  • Norman E. Shumway : F. John Lewis, MD: 1916-1993 . In: Ann Thorac Surg. , Vol. 61, 1996, pp. 250-251, PMID 8561575
  • NE Shumway: C. Walton and F. John . In: Ann Thorac Surg. , Vol. 68, 1999, 3 Suppl., Pp. 34-36
  • PW Fedak: Open hearts. The origins of direct-vision intracardiac surgery . In: Tex. Heart Inst. J. , Vol. 25, 1998, pp. 100-111, PMID 9654653

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Lewis, F. John
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lewis, Floyd John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American surgeon
DATE OF BIRTH November 26, 1916
DATE OF DEATH 20th September 1993
Place of death Santa Barbara (California)