Michel Mirowski

Mieczysław "Michel" Mirowski (* as Mordechai Frydman on October 14, 1924 in Warsaw ; † March 26, 1990 ) was the co-inventor of the implantable automatic defibrillator (ICD).

Michel Mirowski, born in Poland in 1924, had to flee from the Nazis during the Second World War. After the war, he trained as a doctor in Israel, Mexico City, Baltimore and France, which he completed in 1954 with his doctorate . The sudden cardiac death of a colleague from ventricular fibrillation was the key experience of the doctor in 1967 for his further research in the field of cardiology . In July 1969, together with Morton M. Mower at the Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, he developed the first prototype of a device that was supposed to bring life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias back to normal. Just a month later, they tested this precursor to the ICD on a dog. In 1972 the collaboration began with the medical technology company Medrad, which the doctor and engineer Stephen Heilman had established. The development team also included the engineer Alois Langer . After the first automatic defibrillator had been successfully inserted into a person for the first time in 1980, Mirowski and his colleagues worked in the following years to make the device smaller and technically improve it so that the implantation no longer required opening the chest .

At the end of the 1980s, Mirowski was diagnosed with bone marrow disease from which he died in March 1990.

source

S. Mahapatra: History of Cardiac Pacing. In: IR Efimov, MW Kroll, P. Tchou (Eds.): Cardiac Bioelectric Therapy: Mechanisms and Practical Implications. Springer, New York 2009, pp. 10-11

Web links

• MW Deyell et al .: The implantable cardioverter-defibrillator: From Mirowski to its current use. In: BCMJ, Issue 52, No. 5, June 2010