Dr. John Gibbon invented the heart-lung machine and used it to perform the world’s first successful open-heart surgery on May 6, 1953. Dr. John Gibbon was a researcher and surgeon at Jefferson Medical ...

Cardiopulmonary bypass is a surgical procedure that uses a machine to perform the functions of the heart and lungs. It enables a surgeon to open and repair the heart without interrupting its essential ...

The creation of heart-lung bypass was clearly "one of the major milestones of modern medicine," said Dr. James K. Kirklin, the former director of cardiothoracic surgery at the University of Alabama at ...

Procedures like these are possible because medical teams can stop a patient's heart, pump their blood with a machine during surgery, and restart the repaired heart afterward. The development of that ...