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Fifty years of open-heart surgery.

On May 6th, 2003, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first successful open-heart operation performed with the use of the heart-lung machine, one of the most important forms of therapy in the history of cardiac disease. On that spring day in Philadelphia, John H. Gibbon, Jr, MD, of the Jefferson University Medical Center, using total cardiopulmonary bypass for 26 minutes, closed a large secundum atrial septal defect in an 18-year-old woman. Beginning with this case, generations of cardiac surgeons have been able to operate on millions of human hearts with alacrity, efficiency, and consistency to correct complicated congenital heart defects, cardiac valve disorders in the young and old, atherosclerotic coronary artery obstructions, and large aneurysms of the thoracic aorta.

Until 1953, cardiac surgery was in its infancy and was more of a curiosity, except for treatment of rheumatic mitral stenosis, beginning in 1923 with Cutler’s successful case of a closed mitral commissurotomy with a tenotomy knife at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston.1 The only successful heart operations done before 1953 were closed techniques for mitral stenosis,2 a few clinical experiments in 1952 with “open” heart by deep hypothermic arrest by John Lewis at the University of Minnesota,3 and the “blue-baby” operations of the 1940s and 1950s.4

It is not a fluke that John Gibbon was the first to do this procedure. He had studied and worked tirelessly on this project for 23 years before the first successful application. Dr Gibbon, who would have also celebrated his one-hundredth birthday in 2003, was a medical student at Jefferson and finished his residency in surgery at the Pennsylvania Hospital in the late 1920s. In 1930, he obtained a research fellowship with Dr Edward Churchill, the Chief of Surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. On …