Dr. John H. Gibbon

John Gibbon, with his pioneering experimental work at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston in the late 1930s, was a major contributor to development of cardio-pulmonary bypass (CPB). One of his supporter-colleagues was a researcher at Harvard, Mary “Maly” Hopkinson. They married and continued working together, mostly at the University of Pennsylvania’s research laboratories. By 1939, they published results of total body perfusion experiments on a number of laboratory cats that survived by employing the early apparatus invented by Gibbon.

    In 1953, he performed the first successful operation in which the patient was totally supported by CPB when he repaired an atrial septal defect in a young woman using a pump-oxygenator. Unfortunately, his subsequent four patients died of a variety of problems, and he became discouraged with the method.

    The Mayo Clinic, which probably had more cardiac cases than anywhere in the U.S., asked for plans for Gibbon’s oxygenator, which he shared with them in February 1953.     The Mayo Clinic further developed the “Mayo Gibbon-type oxygenator” and for the next several years used this device on hundreds of patients. The mortality rate for intracardiac surgery dropped from 50% in 1955, to 20% in 1956 and to 10% in 1957. A new age for cardiac surgery was underway.