The Heart Healers (62 page)

Boston intellectual Paul Zoll, the cardiologist who worked with Dwight Harken in London’s wartime hospital, returned home to pioneer breakthroughs in treatment of disorders of the heart’s electrical system. Courtesy Zoll Medical

Earl Bakken, as I know him from many dinners together in Hawaii, catapulted from repairman to unimaginably successful entrepreneur when opportunity beckoned, a quintessential representative of The American Dream. Courtesy Earl Bakken

In the early years, the patient was tethered to his life-maintaining pacemaker. Courtesy of The Bakken Library and Museum and the Heart Rhythm Society

The relationship between the logarithm of heart rate and life expectancy is linear.

Medtronic, the pioneer of the medical device industry began as two guys in a 1950s Minneapolis garage and evolved to tens of thousands employees today. Courtesy of The Bakken Library and Museum and the Heart Rhythm Society

Brilliant, inventive, sensitive, funny Walt Lillehei lived a turbulent life according to his own rules. Courtesy William Hoffman

Albert Starr was only 32 years old when he and retired engineer Lowell Edwards overcame innumerable obstacles to create a mechanical valve to replace a diseased human valve. Their first valve was a ball-in-cage structure that bears no resemblance at all to its human counterpart. But it worked.

Werner Forssmann’s story is one of the strangest in medicine.

Profoundly principled Argentine surgeon Rene Favaloro and lovable rebel Mason Sones considered themselves brothers as Favaloro pioneered coronary artery bypass surgery. Courtesy Cleveland Clinic Historical Foundation

Injection of X-ray-dense solution into a vessel creates an angiogram. On the left is a right coronary artery obstructed by a blood clot on a ruptured plaque in a patient with acute myocardial infarction; on the right, blood flow has been restored by inflating a balloon at the site of plaque rupture.

Retired engineer Lowell Edwards and youthful surgeon Albert Starr overcame innumerable technical obstacles in creating a mechanical valve to replace a diseased human valve. Their first valve was a ball-in-cage structure that bears no resemblance at all to its human counterpart. But it worked. Courtesy Albert Starr MD and Edwards Laboratories

Cardiac transplantation was almost entirely the product of years of research in the laboratory of Norman Shumway. So how could public acclaim for his monumental accomplishment be snatched from him on a Sunday morning in South Africa? Courtesy Stanford Medical History Center