A Surgeonʼs View of Extracorporeal Circulation

Because this lecture series is named after Dr. John Gibbon, an examination of the remarkable developments that were set in motion by John and Maly Gibbon's work on extracorporeal circulation is not only appropriate to this forum but is, in fact, long overdue. Although John Gibbon and his wife have been honored in many countries for their basic contribution to medicine, it is my belief that the work was of Nobel stature, and I am sure that if the rules for selecting a Nobel prize winner had been different, John Gibbon would have certainly been the recipient. I feel particularly pleased to be speaking of them today because what may be the most important trip I ever took was a visit to their laboratory in Philadelphia in 1952 to watch their progress in developing the heart-lung machine. As we were doing research in the field and had no pump, he gave me one of his original circular pumps, which we subsequently used with our disc oxygenator in the first 300 open heart operations performed in our unit.