A Dream of the Heart: The Life of John H. Gibbon, Jr., Father of the Heart-Lung Machine (review)

Harris B. Shumacker, Jr. A Dream of the Heart: The Life of John H. Gibbon, Jr., Father of the Heart-Lung Machine. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Fithian Press, 1999. 301 pp. Ill. $24.95.

John H. Gibbon, Jr., was world-renowned for his invention and first successful human use of the heart-lung machine. Harris B. Shumacker, Jr., a distinguished cardiovascular surgeon and good friend of "Jack" Gibbon, gives a penetrating, graceful perspective on this epochal achievement and on the determined, enigmatic man who made intracardiac surgery feasible and safe for millions of patients.

Surgeons lecturing on cardiovascular disease in 1950 would often close their talks with a wistful reference to the distant day when immense surgical progress would ensue after the invention of a machine to substitute for the function of heart and lungs. That day arrived on 6 May 1953, when Jack Gibbon brought twenty-three years of tenacious machine-building to a climax by closing a defect between the upper chambers in the heart of Cecelia Bavolek. Cure of the congenital cardiac defect in this seriously ill, eighteen-year-old college freshman was not immediately trumpeted to the lay press, or even to the scientific world. Therein lies a hint of the complex, unassuming personality behind the magnificent technical and surgical achievement of this patrician Philadelphia surgeon.

This is not the conventional chronological account of a distinguished surgical life, nor does it review all of the technical steps that produced a revolutionary device to expand immeasurably the frontiers of cardiac surgery. Rather, it is a warmly perceptive portrayal of a highly sensitive man and his complex family relationships, illuminated by insights from the author's long-standing, collegial friendship. By virtue of that close friendship, Harry Shumacker had access to the private thoughts of the Gibbon children, with whom their father was never comfortable on an individual basis. When thirty-seven-year-old Jack Gibbon in 1941 left an understandably resentful wife to manage a family of four young children with limited financial resources while he volunteered to serve in a war that the United States had not yet entered, some of his children considered it desertion. They could scarcely have appreciated fully the distinguished military record of Jack Gibbon's ancestors, because he rarely discussed what many might properly have embraced as a badge of honor; but off he went, like his duty-driven relatives before him. Just as quixotic as his abandonment of family was the interruption of his long-standing research on designing the heart-lung machine, a project in which his redoubtable wife was intimately and creatively involved.

Gibbon's strong early aspirations for a career in literature or poetry, discouraged by his physician father and by the family tradition of physicians going back five generations, may have contributed to the idealistic noblesse oblige to his military ancestors that sent him to the South Pacific. Literature and philosophy had always tugged at him, even after he somewhat reluctantly enrolled in medical school, and when he resolved to abandon his early medical studies, only the stern authoritarian pressure of his father kept him in a medical career that gradually became more attractive in the clinical years. It is notable that he ultimately achieved in 1954 the considerable distinction of the American Surgical Association (ASA) presidency, a position his father had occupied in 1925 (not 1921, as the text on p. 58 suggests). This was a family combination unique in the 120-year history of the ASA. Many other honors followed after 1953, as captured well in a chapter detailing the special celebrations, the Mutter Museum replica of the heart-lung machine, and the Thomas Jefferson University Hospital building dedicated in his name on 9 January 1990.

There are chapters on Gibbon's military heritage; on his views...