Wilfred Gordon Bigelow

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Wilfred Gordon Bigelow (born June 18, 1913 in Brandon (Manitoba) , † March 27, 2005 ) was a Canadian heart surgeon.

Life

He was the son of the doctor and surgeon Wilfred Abram Bigelow (1879-1966), who founded Canada's first private clinic in Brandon.

Bigelow studied at the University of Toronto , where he made his bachelor's degree in 1935 and his doctorate in medicine in 1938. It followed from 1938 to 1941 a specialist training as a surgeon (residency) at Toronto General Hospital. After military service in the Second World War as a surgeon in the European theater of war, he continued his training in cardiac surgery with Richard Bing and Alfred Blalock at the Johns Hopkins University Hospital from 1946 to 1947 . He then returned to Toronto General Hospital (TGH), where he began as a surgeon in 1947.

In 1948 he became an associate professor and later professor of surgery at the University of Toronto. In 1953 he became head of the third department of general surgery at the TGH and from 1956 until his retirement in 1977 he was head of cardiac surgery at the TGH. Even afterwards he worked there as a surgeon (Consulting Surgeon). He also headed the Cardiovascular Laboratory at the Banting Research Institute from 1937 and was a surgeon at Sunnybrook Hospital and an advisory surgeon at Women's College Hospital. At the TGH he founded the Cardiovascular Investigative Unit in 1956 and from 1958 organized a hospital-wide training program for cardiac surgery in Toronto.

plant

Bigelow pioneered pacemaker technology in Canada and is known for introducing hypothermia to open heart surgery. During the 1940s and 1950s he introduced and developed new surgical methods in cardiac surgery, such as the Vineberg operation or the commissurotomy of the mitral valves .

In 1951 Bigelow developed and tested the first cardiac pacemakers with JC Callaghan and JA Hopps from the National Research Council of Canada (as an emergency measure for cardiac arrest, initially in their hypothermia experiments in operations on dogs). Starting in 1947, he and colleagues from the Cardiovascular Laboratory of the Banting Research Institute developed techniques for hypothermia in heart operations, which made the first human open heart operation possible in 1953. He also wrote two books on medical history in his retirement.

Memberships and honors

He was President of the Canadian Federation of Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgeons in 1967, President of the Society for Vascular Surgery in 1968/69, President of the Canadian Cardiovascular Society 1970–72, Vice President of the International Cardiovascular Society in 1956 and 1971, and President of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery in 1974.

In 1959 he received the Gairdner Foundation International Award and he received numerous other awards such as the 1992 Starr Medal of the Canadian Medical Association. He was an officer in the Order of Canada (1981). In 1997 he was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame . He received honorary doctorates from the University of Hamburg (1990) and the University of Toronto and was an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England .

Private

He had been married to the nurse Margaret Ruth Jennings since 1941 and had four children. He was a keen hunter and angler and was chairman of the Nature Conservancy of Canada from 1958 to 1987.

Fonts

  • Cold Hearts: The Story of Hypothermia and the Pacemaker in Heart Surgery. McClelland & Stewart, Toronto 1984. (The book won the Hannah Medal of the Royal Society of Canada in 1986)
  • Mysterious Heparin: The Key to Open Heart Surgery. McGraw-Hill Ryerson, Toronto 1990.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Supply of parts of the heart in coronary heart disease by implanting a thoracic artery ( internal thoracic artery )
  2. WG Bigelow, H. Basian, GA Trusler: Internal Mammary Artery Implantation for Coronary Heart Disease. A clinical follow-up study on to eight years after operation. In: The Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery . Volume 45, Jan 1963, pp. 67-79.
  3. Expansion of fused heart valves
  4. ^ JC Callaghan, WG Bigelow: An Electrical Artificial Pacemaker for Standstill of the Heart. In: Annals of Surgery . Volume 134, July 1951, pp. 8-17. PMC 1802664 (free full text)
  5. ^ WG Bigelow, JC Callaghan, JA Hopps: General Hypothermia for Experimental Intracardiac Surgery. In: Annals of Surgery. Volume 132, September 1950, pp. 531-539. Hopps was the electrical engineer involved alongside the two doctors.