348 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1955 



Also in Canada, at the Hospital for Sick Children and at the 

 University of Toronto, W. T. Mustard and A. L. Chute recommended 

 the use of actual lung tissue as a medium for oxygenating blood in a 

 heart-lung machine. The use of a Imig from another animal of the 

 same species was found to be the experimental method of choice (Mus- 

 tard, Chute, and Simmons, 1952). With this biological lung they 

 reported that they had their first survival of an experimental animal 

 in March 1949 (Mustard and Chute, 1951) . Gibbon and his associates 

 at the Jefferson Medical College of Philadelphia continued their ex- 

 periments which were started in the 1930's. The reports indicated 

 various degrees of success on dogs using a heart-lung machine built 

 by the International Business Machines Corporation (Stokes and 

 Gibbon, 1950; Anon., 1950; Lear, 1952; Engel, 1952; Miller, Gibbon, 

 and Fineberg, 1953 ; Miller, Gibbon, Greco, Smith, Colin, and AUbrit- 

 ten, 1953) . From the Childrens Memorial Hospital of Chicago came 

 the report (Potts, Riker, DeBord, and Andrews, 1952) that "dogs were 

 kept alive one and one-half hours" using a heart-lung machine. Other 

 centers where research on mechanical hearts and heart-lungs were car- 

 ried on included Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in JjOS Angeles; Johns 

 Hopkins University, Baltimore; Tulane University School of Medi- 

 cine, New Orleans; University of Louisville School of Medicine, 

 Louisville; and at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md.^ 



The interest in the field had built up to a feverish pitch by 1951. 

 Then the first reports were made public that several of these instru- 

 ments had been used on human patients. On April 5, 1951, Clarence 

 Dennis and his associates at the University of Minnesota applied their 

 heart-lung machine to a 6-year-old girl who was dying from a hole 

 in the wall between the two auricles. The mechanical heart-lung was 

 employed for 40 minutes, but too much blood was lost and the girl 

 died. Even so, Dennis wrote in his report, "In spite of the tragic loss 

 of the patient in question, we are inclined to feel encouraged with the 

 performance of this apparatus" (Dennis, Spreng, Nelson, Karlson, 

 Nelson, Thomas, Eder, and Varco, 1951). 



On August 9, 1951, A. Mario Dogliotti of the University of Torino, 

 Italy, performed what appears to be the first successful artificial extra- 

 cardiac circulation in a human patient (Dogliotti, 1952). This appa- 

 ratus was used to oxygenate the blood and to complement the activity 

 of the heart during surgery on a tumor pressing on a man's heart. It 

 was not, however, used for a complete bypass. On April 3, 1952, 

 another medical research team at the University of Cincinnati College 

 of Medicine and the Fels Research Institute, Antioch College, Yellow 

 Springs, Ohio, used a heart-lung machine on a 45-year-old patient for 



'Research Reports, BioSciences Information Exchange, Smithsonian Institu- 

 tion. 



