John Webster Kirklin
John Webster Kirklin (born April 5, 1917 in Muncie , Indiana , † April 21, 2004 in Birmingham , Alabama ) was an American heart surgeon .
Life
Kirklin was the son of the director of radiology at the Mayo Clinic . He graduated from the University of Minnesota (Bachelor in 1938) and made his MD degree in medicine from Harvard University magna cum laude in 1942 . He began his specialist training at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia (internship), was then a Fellow in surgery from 1943 at the Mayo Clinic (residency) and began training as a neurosurgeon at O'Reilly General Hospital in Missouri . From 1944 to 1946 he served as a neurosurgeon in the US Army, most recently with the rank of captain. He then continued his residency at the Mayo Clinic, where he spent six months at Boston Children's Hospital as an assistant resident in pediatrics with surgeon Robert E. Gross . There he switched from neurosurgery to cardiac surgery.
From 1950 he was back at the Mayo Clinic. In the 1950s he improved the heart-lung machine there (originally developed by John Heysham Gibbon , who carried out the first human operation with it in 1953, but has since been abandoned by him) to such an extent that it is routinely used, for example, in heart operations could. Among other things, he and colleagues developed an oxygenator and a pump (Mayo-Gibbon-Pump). He was one of the first to perform a series of open heart operations in 1955. He was also a pioneer in the development of surgical techniques for the surgical treatment of a number of congenital heart defects (for which he was known as a specialist), heart valve operations and coronary heart disease. In 1960 he became professor and in 1964 head of surgery at the Mayo Clinic. In 1966 he went to the University of Alabama (UAB) Medical School in Birmingham (Alabama) as a professor and head of surgery , where he greatly expanded the system of associated hospitals, established his own system of medical training and established the UAB as a center in the USA for cardiac surgery. A clinic he founded is named in his honor there (built by the architect IM Pei ). In 1982 he resigned from management at UAB, but continued to operate until 1989.
In 1972 he received the Lister Medal . He was an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons (1969) and the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland. He has received several honorary doctorates (Hamline University, Munich, Georgetown University, St. Paul (Minnesota), Indiana University, Bordeaux, Marseille). He was a member of the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences . He received the Research Achievement Award from the American Heart Association, the Medallion for Scientific Achievement from the American Surgical Association, the Rudolph Matas Award in Vascular Surgery, and the Ray C. Fish Award from the Texas Heart Institute (1977). In 1967 he gave the Caldwell Lecture at Harvard University ( The Tetralogy of Fallot ).
He was the editor of the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery and was president of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery . He has published over 700 papers as an author or co-author. He is also known for his two-volume textbook Cardiac surgery: morphology, diagnostic criteria, natural history, techniques, results, and indications (Churchill Livingstone, 1956) with Brian Barratt-Boyes.
He was married to the doctor Margaret K. Kirklin (died 2009) and had two sons and a daughter. His wife was the academic director of the surgeon training program that Kirklin started at UAB in 1967. His son James Kirklin is himself a heart surgeon and head of the heart transplant department at UAB.
literature
- Jörg Ostermeyer: Memories of John W. Kirklin . Hamburger Ärzteblatt 12/2011, pp. 12-17
Web links
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Kirklin, John Webster |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American surgeon and cardiologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 5, 1917 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Muncie , Indiana |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 21, 2004 |
| Place of death | Birmingham , Alabama |