MECHANICAL HEART — GRIFFENHAGEN AND HUGHES 349 



oxygenating the blood for 75 minutes without apparent harmful 

 effects. However, this heart-lung machine did not bypass the heart, 

 but was used as an aid for relieving cyanosis (Helms worth, Clark, 

 Kaplan, Sherman, and Largen, 1952a, b ; Anon., 1952). 



During the Dallas meeting of the American Association for 

 Thoracic Surgery, May 8-10, 1952, F. D. Dodrill of Detroit, Mich., 

 presented a report in which he described a mechanical heart that was 

 designed, built, and tested through the cooperative effort of a team 

 of medical men headed by himself and engineers from the Research 

 Laboratories Division of the General Motors Corporation. Eesults 

 of some 65 successful experiments,^ which had been performed on dogs, 

 including right-sided substitution, left-sided substitution, and com- 

 plete heart bypass, were reported, along with a description of the appa- 

 ratus (Dodrill, Hill, and Gerisch, 1952a). The large number of suc- 

 cessful experiments in which not a single animal was reported to have 

 died of infection would probably have received wide acclaim and a 

 good deal of attention by itself. However, before the paper appeared 

 in the August 1952 issue of the Journal of Thoracic Surgery, an even 

 more outstanding event took place, which overshadowed the initial 

 report. On July 3, the Dodrill-GME. mechanical heart (pi. 2, fig. 2, and 

 pi. 4, fig. 1) was used for the first successful total substitution of the 

 left ventricle on a 41-year-old white male for 50 minutes during an 

 operation at Harper Hospital in Detroit (Dodrill, HjII, and Gerisch, 

 1952b ; Motter, 1953) . Then on October 21, 1952, the same mechanical 

 heart was used on a 16-year-old white boy for the first successful total 

 bypass of the right heart in a human patient (Dodrill, Hill, Gerisch, 

 and Johnson, 1953). Finally, an operation was performed on an 

 18-year-old girl in which the patient's heart was completely bypassed 

 (Dodrill, 1954). 



The criteria that the medical and engineering research group set 

 up for design of the Dodrill-GMR mechanical heart consisted of 6 

 main points : 1, The machine must simulate the action of the human 

 heart ; 2, it must be small, compact, and of foolproof mechanical con- 

 struction; 3, the parts of the machine coming into contact with the 

 blood must be readily sterilized ; 4, its pumping action must be gentle 

 enough to prevent blood-cell breakdown, yet powerful enough to 

 maintain an adequate blood pressure throughout the entire body; 

 5, the volume of donor blood used to fill the machine must be relatively 

 small ; 6, the machine and components must have adequate safeguards 

 to insure uninterrupted functioning throughout the operation. 



As the result of the investigation of numerous types of pumps, it was 

 felt that every effort should be made to evolve a design in which the 

 pressure to which blood cells might be subjected should never exceed 



* Supported in part by the Michigan Heart Association. . . " 



