With the exception of a few bold scientists, the heart remained surgically untouchable for two and a half more centuries.
Those who dared to suggest that heart surgery was, indeed, possible, were looked upon with doubt and disbelief by their peers. Heart wounds could be sutured and the cavity surrounding the heart could be drained, but little beyond these procedures found acceptance.
By the turn of the twentieth century, medical science was booming, and yet cardiac surgery remained virtually non-existent. Scientists had pioneered major advances in anesthesia, antibiotics, and blood transfusions, but successful surgery of the heart and chest was still decades away. Doctors carrying out experimental work in the early 1900s failed more often then they succeeded, and open-heart surgery remained an evasive pursuit.
In the early 1930s a young medical resident, touched by the death of a patient suffering from a pulmonary embolism, gave birth to an idea that he pursued vigorously for the next twenty years. John "Jack" H. Gibbon (1903-1973) proposed building a machine that would perform the function of the heart and lungs during surgery.
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