Pioneers of Cardiac Surgery

William C. DeVries, MD

Transplant—Artificial Heart 469 William C. DeVries, MD (b. 1943) I could be talking to a ladies’ garden group or the American College of Cardiology, and they would ask the same questions. They always wanted to know what it felt like to have an artificial heart. — On the first total artificial heart Interviewed June 3, 1999 I was born in New York in 1943, but I lived most of my younger life in Utah. My mother was a nurse working in Salt Lake City, and my father was a rotating intern at the Latter Day Saints Hospital (LDS) when the war broke out. One night he received a telephone call from his father who said, “Henry, this is your dad and you are an embarrassment to me. The Germans have taken over our country (Holland). You are my oldest son, and you are the only son who hasn’t joined the armed forces.” My father explained to his father that he was trying to finish his internship, that he had just gotten married, and that he was waiting for a year or so to get on his feet, but his father said that he was to join the navy the very next day, and he did. He was a Dutch immigrant, and Dutch immigrants usually followed everything their father said. So I was born in the Brooklyn Naval Yards, and my father went away to war right after I was born. He never even saw me, for he was killed in action when I was about six months old. My mother gathered up all of our effects, and we went back across the country on a train. When she returned to southern California where her mother lived, she found out that her father had been killed in the war as well. Many times we do not understand what war is like. My mother and grandmother had a double funeral for my father and grandfather. Later we moved back to Salt Lake City, and I was raised there. It was a safe haven for my mother, as most of her family came from that area. My mother remarried when I was about five years old, and I have nine wonderful brothers and sisters and a great stepfather. We had a great family. When time came for college there was not much money, as there were nine other children. I went to the University of Utah, basically because they offered me a basketball and track scholarship. I thought of college as a job, and so I ran and jumped my way through college. I went to medical school at the University of Utah as well. When I was in my first year, I walked into a lecture one day because I did not have anything to do at the time. The speaker was Dr. Willem Kolff from the Cleveland Clinic. Dr. Reemtsma was the chief of surgery at the University of Utah, and with his special interest in renal transplantation he was in the process of recruiting Dr. Kolff. In his lecture, Dr. Kolff talked about the artificial kidney and the artificial heart, and I was absolutely fascinated. The lecture lasted two hours, and I missed one of my gross anatomy classes because I lost track of the time. After the lecture , I went up to Dr. Kolff and said, “This is the most interesting thing I have ever heard in my life, and I would like to work with you if I could.” He replied that there were some positions available for summer work at the Cleveland Clinic, and asked my name. (DeVries is probably the most common name in Holland.) He said, “You sound like 470 Pioneers of Cardiac Surgery a good Dutch boy. You’re hired.” That is how I got my start. I ran into Dr. Kolff during my freshman year, and he took me under his wing. I worked at the Cleveland Clinic that first summer, about the time Dr. Kolff was preparing to move his lab to the University of Utah. He had finished his work on dialysis and had started working on the artificial heart, and I continued to work under his supervision back in Utah. I decided that I wanted to leave Salt Lake City after medical school. I was just an old western boy, and in the West you look to the East and the South as the centers of culture. I thought I would eventually come back to practice medicine in the...