Pioneers of Cardiac Surgery

Henry T. Bahnson, MD

The Early Years 185 Henry T. Bahnson, MD (b. 1920) The allocation of organs from donors is controversial as to whether the donated organ should be offered to the closest transplant team or should be offered first to the sickest patient on the National Registry. I think that organs should go to the sickest patient first. — On allocation of donor hearts Interviewed August 3, 1999 I grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina , in a Moravian church community. When I was a boy, the opinion of other people in your community and service to the community were very important. Early in life, it was one of my goals to find a way to serve my community. I was sent to a boys’ camp outside Winston-Salem—Camp Haines—and one of the camp activities was to go next door to the Covington farm and pick tobacco. It turned out that my grandfather had delivered all of the babies at that farm, which made a big impression on me. It seemed very noble, and it made me want to go into medicine. I went to Davidson College for my undergraduate work, and because I did pretty well I was accepted at Harvard Medical School. When I came home after the first summer at Harvard, the war was on. I looked for some research to do and got in touch with Dr. Tinsley Harrison, who at that time was a newcomer to Winston-Salem. I told him I wanted to do some research, and he lined me up with a project involving hemorrhage and vascular grafts. Dr. Harrison was not much on technical things, and so I did all the technical work. This honed my skills a bit, and I worked pretty hard and earned the approval of Dr. Harrison. I ended up with material for a paper, which was subsequently published. Later, when I was getting ready to apply for an internship, Dr. Harrison told me that he would only approve three places for me to go, and one of those was Johns Hopkins. A number of my friends had been there, so I applied in the usual manner. Dr. Blalock at Hopkins normally asked for interviews , but I was excused from that because of Dr. Harrison’s recommendation. Dr. Blalock said that if I was good enough for Dr. Harrison , that was good enough. It was a very good time to be at Johns Hopkins. It was wartime in 1944, and there were only eight interns. There were four residents, and the chief resident was Bill Longmire, who, of course, was a tremendous leader, surgeon, advisor, and head of the surgical service. I got involved in research on hypertension, one aspect of which was working on coarctation of the aorta. We tried to create a stenosis by first dividing the subclavian artery and turning it down and anastomosing it to the distal aorta. We would then divide the aorta between the subclavian and the distal anastomosis so that all of the aortic flow had to go through the subclavian artery. This produced a constriction to the flow similar to a coarctation. This was my own project. Vivien Thomas was there, and he was a tremendous help. He showed me how to anesthetize dogs and anastomose arteries . He taught me a lot of other techniques as well. Nothing really came of this except some 186 Pioneers of Cardiac Surgery improved technical skills on my part, but I think it had something to do with my staying on at Hopkins. The number of assistant residents was cut from eight to three during the war. I was drafted for one year, and when I came home from the war, I stopped by to see Dr. Harrison, who at that time was in Dallas. He urged me to go back to Hopkins, so I did. In late November 1944 Dr. Blalock did the first Blue Baby operation on Eileen Saxon. I believe that Denton Cooley was the intern. The operation was done in late November just before changing services, and I rotated onto the service as Denton rotated off. My job was to take care of Eileen. A lot of people, mainly Dr. Blalock and Dr. Taussig , were hovering over her. She didn’t seem to be less blue than she had been before the operation, but Eileen got better over the next few days. It is interesting how little treatment we had to give back then. There wasn’t really much you could...