Pioneers of Cardiac Surgery

Donald N. Ross, FRCS

Valvular Heart Surgery 285 Donald N. Ross, FRCS (b. 1922) There was experimental work by Lower and Shumway that showed that when they put a dog’s pulmonary valve into the descending aorta, the valve would thicken up but remain intact. Clearly, it did work under aortic pressure and we began thinking of using the pulmonary valve as an aortic valve substitute. The day we did the first pulmonary autograft, we stood back and waited to see if the cusps would tear. Of course, they didn’t, and one has never torn, as far as I know. — On the first use of an autogenous pulmonary valve to replace the aortic valve Interviewed August 13, 1997 I was born in Kimberly, South Africa, and I think that I still have a South African accent. Some people mistake it for Australian, but it is South African and I am proud of that. My parents came from Scotland. My father was from Glasgow and my mother was from the Highlands. They left Scotland because it was cold and rather miserable, and they were poor. The economy was slow. My father worked in Glasgow on the Clyde, which was the shipbuilding area of Glasgow. I think he was wise to get out. It was a hard, struggling life in Scotland at that time. His brother emigrated to New Zealand and Father went to South Africa to make a new life; my mother followed shortly afterwards. They remained very Scot-oriented for the rest of their lives. For example, my mother’s accent was so strong that sometimes she couldn’t be understood on the telephone, and the grocer would have to get someone to come to the phone and translate from Scots into English. My father’s lowland accent was much easier to understand. They wanted to make a Scot out of me, so when I was six they sent me to Scotland to live with my grandparents for a year. It was too cold for me coming from South Africa, but I suppose they were right that I should be brought up, to some extent, with my grandparents and to understand the environment in which they were brought up. My father had worked in shipyards on the Clyde and was a handyman. They were called joiners, and when he came out to Kimberly he started a light engineering business. He became well-known for his ability to mend guns and repair machinery, so he developed quite a good business. As you know, those were the days of the Depression. We had everything that we needed and life was reasonably pleasant in South Africa, but basically it was austere and the Depression years really made quite a mark on my conscience and my memories. My schooling was all in Kimberly, where I went to the Boys High School. It was an excellent school with the emphasis on the classics, mathematics, and Latin. I really wanted to learn about these things and basically enjoyed school. At that time South Africa was a complex and divided society. The division was not so much between the whites and blacks as it became subsequently, but was within the white community. It was divided between the English-speaking people like me and my 286 Pioneers of Cardiac Surgery family, and the Afrikaans-speaking people, who were the descendants of the Boers. The Boer War was still fresh in people’s minds and there was still some rivalry and hatred which has by now subsided, but when I was growing up the white people were strongly divided. I learned Afrikaans and am fully bilingual and can still speak the language freely. It is similar to Flemish. Now it is not much use to anybody and is seldom spoken. The universities were divided also. Cape Town University was an English-speaking school with English traditions and professors from England and Scotland. Stellenbosch, thirty miles away, was the Afrikaans-speaking equivalent. The same was true in Johannesburg. Witwatersrand University was English speaking and Pretoria University was Afrikaans. There were originally two medical schools, one English and the other Afrikaans. Now there are several medical schools and those language distinctions have been obliterated. The black people were originally not allowed to attend university when I was in school. I am not sure why I decided to study medicine. I had always enjoyed making models and radio sets. I had an inquiring mind, and I enjoyed using my hands too; I suppose that is...