Fifty Years of Open-Heart Surgery

n 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.