the heart-lung machine.
The cardiopulmonary bypass pump, or ‘heart-lung machine’ can take on the role of the heart and lungs during cardiac surgery.
John Gibbon had been moved by the death of a patient during cardiac surgery. Convinced the patient would have survived if their blood circulation had been artificially maintained, he began to investigate the possibility of building an external device that could do the job of the heart and lungs for short intervals.
Gibbon and his wife carried out their initial research using cats, and by 1935 they had developed a machine that could replace the function of a cat’s heart and lungs for 20 minutes.
