Open Heart Surgeries and the Contributions by Dogs

Dr C. Walton Lillehei, who is known as the father of open-heart surgeries, is also a pioneer in valve replacement and the electric pacemaker. Open heart surgeries back in the mid 20th century were just unimaginable, mainly because of hypothermia and unavailability of an artificial heart to continuously pump oxygenated blood to keep the patient alive.

Lillehei wondered if he could use a donor to oxygenate blood from the recipient, and then return the fresh blood to the recipient while the recipient’s heart was stopped and isolated from circulation.

Thus, he experimented on dogs. The circulatory systems of two dogs were connected by a beer hose with a milk pump to push equal amounts of blood in opposite directions without introducing any air bubbles. The recipient dog’s chest was cut open, the arteries and veins were clamped closed and its venous blood was supplied to the donor dog through the milk pump. After oxygenating, the red blood was returned back to the donor. But the procedure conducted by Dr Lillehei and his colleagues was a failure because both the dogs suffered extensive brain damage. After the experiment, the dogs were euthanised to check the effects of this procedure on various organs, but none was found. After enough experiments and trials, they tried it on trained golden retrievers and 30 minutes after the cross-circulation, the dogs were able to follow commands and still do tricks. In 1954, after years of practising on 200 dogs, Lillehei and his team were ready to try it on humans, because many congenital defects could be cured this way. But when proposed to the Variety Club Heart Hospital at the University of Minnesota, they disagreed at first because this procedure had the dangerous potential of killing both the recipient and the donor, but later, they agreed. The first successful human surgery was conducted on a 13-month-old boy named Gregory Glidden, who suffered from VSD (Ventricular Septal Defect) and the donor was his father, Lyman Glidden (although the child died of infection). From then, Lillehei went on to perform many more successful surgeries but this process was later replaced by a bypass machine. However, his contribution to this field is monumental and so are the lives of many dogs.