John Heysham Gibbon

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John Heysham Gibbon Jr. (Born September 29, 1903 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania ; † February 5, 1973 ) was an American surgeon and inventor of the heart-lung machine .

Life

His parents were the surgeon John Heysham Gibbon Sr. and his wife Marjorie Young Gibbon. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Princeton University in 1923. After graduating from Jefferson Medical College of Philadelphia as a doctor of medicine in 1927 , he worked for 2 years at the Pennsylvania Hospital, where he became interested in medical research. From February 1930 he worked in the Boston Massachusetts General Hospital . Here he met his future wife Mary (Maly) Hopkinson (1906-1986) know. From 1946 he was Professor of Surgery (later Samuel D. Gross Professor ) and until 1967 head of surgery at Jefferson Medical College.

While monitoring a patient with pulmonary embolism in October 1930, he came up with the idea of ​​cardiopulmonary bypass. In 1935 he built the prototype of a heart-lung machine with which a cat could survive for around half an hour; this period of time gradually lengthened to over a week, and in 1937 Gibbon published his experimental results. When he continued his research after the Second World War, where he served in Southeast Asia, a medical student made contact with the chairman of IBM and the engineer Thomas J. Watson in 1946 , which gave him both technical (Watson himself and five IBM engineers) and financially helped to construct a powerful heart-lung machine. After he had previously used it in the operation of an 11-month-old toddler, which, however, died during the operation, he was able to demonstrate the functionality of his machine on May 6, 1953 in the operation of an 18-year-old girl's atrial septal defect . However, he could not repeat this single success and initially did not want to publish it as an individual case. The heart-lung machine was then further developed by Viking Olof Bjork (Sweden) and others, and its use in particular by John Webster Kirklin at the Mayo Clinic in the mid-1950s, so that it is now routinely used in the operating theater, especially for open heart operations .

He has received several honorary doctorates (Princeton University, Buffalo, University of Pennsylvania, Dickinson College). He received the Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research in 1968 , the Gairdner Foundation International Award in 1960 , Distinguished Service Awards from both the International Society of Surgery and the Pennsylvania Medical Society, and the American Heart Association's Research Achievement Award. He was an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and since 1967 a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , since 1972 of the National Academy of Sciences .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ John H. Gibbon Jr .: The Development of the Heart-Lung Apparatus. In: The American Journal of Surgery 1978, 135: pp. 608-619, ISSN  0002-9610 , doi : 10.1016 / 0002-9610 (78) 90119-8 .
  2. ↑ Acknowledgment of the Lasker Foundation
  3. ↑ Book of Members 1780 – present, Chapter G. (PDF; 931 kB) In: American Academy of Arts and Sciences (amacad.org). Accessed March 19, 2018 (English).

literature

  • Ada Romaine-Davis: John Gibbon and His Heart-Lung Machine, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991; ISBN 0-8122-3073-6 .
  • David C. Sabiston, Frank Cole Spencer: Gibbon's Surgery of the Chest, 2 vol .; Philadelphia; ISBN 0-7216-7880-7 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Gibbon, John Heysham
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gibbon, John Heysham Jr.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American surgeon and inventor of the heart-lung machine
DATE OF BIRTH September 29, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Philadelphia
DATE OF DEATH 5th February 1973