342 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1955 



obstetrician, at Guy's Hospital in London. In an attempt to determine 

 whether blood could be transfused by a syringe "without becoming 

 unfit for the purposes of life," Blundell circulated a dog's entire blood 

 through a special pump, which he termed an "impellor," without ill 

 effects to the dog. Blundell reported prior to 1834 (Castle, 1834) : 



Directing towards the heart a tubule inserted into the femoral or carotid 

 artery, and the corresponding veins, I placed near to these tubes a cup in com- 

 munication with a proper apparatus, then allowing the blood to rush from the 

 artery into the bottom of the cup, by means of an instrument called an im- 

 pellor ... I absorbed this fluid into the barrel of a syringe, and returned it 

 to the veins, so adjusting the return to the eruption from the artery, that more 

 than an ounce of blood was never allowed to accumulate in the cup or the 

 syringe at one time . . . the operation was carried on for twenty or thirty 

 minutes together, the blood rushing from the artery during the whole time, so 

 that all the blood in the body of the animal must have passed the syringe, and 

 this too repeatedly, the dog, however, not appearing to suffer materially in 

 consequence. 



Aside from this very remarkable experiment by Blundell, experi- 

 ments that eventually led to the conception of a mechanical substitu- 

 tion of the heart dealt with the perfusion of living organs and 

 tissues. 



In 1828, a Frenchman named Kay showed that artificial perfusion 

 with blood was capable of restoring irritability of dying muscle, and 

 in 1846, Wild, a German, described what is probably the first per- 

 fusion of the isolated heart (Garrison and Morton, 1943.) In 1858, 

 Charles-Edouard Brown Sequard (1818-1894) observed the reestab- 

 lishment of certain cerebral functions by circulating blood through 

 the vessels of a head separated from its body, while in 1866 iSlie de 

 Cyon (1842-1912) kept the isolated heart of a frog beating for 48 

 hours. From the laboratories of Carl Friedrich Ludwig (1816- 

 1895) in 1868 came one of the first specially made apparatuses by 

 which blood could be forced under constant pressure from a reservoir 

 ( Belt, Smith, and Wliipple, 1920) . 



Henry Newell Martin (1848-1896), professor of biology at Johns 

 Hopkins University, made "one of the greatest single contributions 

 ever to come from an American physiological laboratory" (Garri- 

 son and Morton, 1943), when in 1880 he devised a new means of 

 studying the activity of the mammalian heart. Henry Sewall, Mar- 

 tin's assistant, recorded : "I very well remember one morning, I think 

 it was in the Fall of 1880, Martin said to me in effect, 'I could not 

 sleep last night and the thought came to me that the problem of isolat- 

 ing the mammalian heart might be solved by getting return circula- 

 tion through coronary vessels'" (Sewall, 1911). In Martin's own 

 words, published in 1883: 



The fundamental idea upon which all my work on the isolated mammalian 

 heart has been based is to occlude all vessels of the systemic circulation except 



