John Gibbon

On May 6, 1953, at Jefferson Medical College Hospital in Philadelphia, Gibbon used his heart-lung machine to perform the first successful open-heart surgery on a human, closing an atrial septal defect in an 18-year-old patient. This was the culmination of over two decades of development that Gibbon had begun in the early 1930s.

Gibbon began working on the concept of a machine that could temporarily replace the heart and lungs in the 1930s, meaning he spent roughly 20-plus years on its development before the first successful human use in 1953. He built successive prototypes, first testing the device on cats and later on dogs, often with engineering assistance from IBM engineers.

The heart-lung machine, also called a cardiopulmonary bypass machine, temporarily takes over the function of the heart and lungs by draining blood from the body, oxygenating it, and pumping it back into the circulatory system. This allows surgeons to stop the heart and operate on a still, bloodless field, which is essential for procedures like repairing valve defects or closing holes in the heart.

Gibbon was a surgeon and professor at Jefferson Medical College (now Sidney Kimmel Medical College) in Philadelphia when he performed the landmark 1953 operation. He had previously conducted much of his early research at the University of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts General Hospital before joining Jefferson.