| The Biography of a Life-Saving Inventor
A Dream of the Heart-The Life of John H.Gibbon, Jr., Father of the Heart-Lung Machine by Harris B Shumacker, Jr., M.D., is a biography and tribute to the inventor of the heart–lung machine.
Gibbon, known to his family and friends as Jack, came from a long line of distinguished physicians and surgeons. He also came from a prominent patrician Philadelphia family. He was educated at Princeton, he married well and happily, he fathered and raised four fine children, and he served his country in World War II (his ancestry also includes a distinguished roster of military men). And he served humanity by becoming a physician and especially by devoting his life and his career to the quest to develop a heart–lung machine, which would prove to be one of the most important mechanical advances in modern medicine. The machine, first applied successfully in 1953, revolutionized open-heart surgery thereafter.
Jack Gibbon was a good and thoughtful man, a poet and philosopher as well as a scientist. This account of his life, by a colleague and friend who knew him well, offers a rare insight into what makes a man serve his species brilliantly and kindly. It is a portrait of a marriage and of a family in several generations. It is a tribute to American well-to-do society doing good as well as doing it well. It is an account of the development of heart-related medicine over most of the twentieth century.
Most of all, A Dream of the Heart celebrates a man who never called himself a hero, but who knew he had a reason to live and lived up to that reason.
 |
About the Author
Harris B Shumacker, Jr., has been a leader in the development of cardiovascular surgery and one of its best historians. He served on the faculties of Johns Hopkins, Yale, and Indiana Universities, the latter where he chaired the department for twenty years, and at the Uniformed Services University, at which he holds the title of Distinguished Professor of Surgery. He has authored six other books, more than fifty chapters in texts and monographs, and several hundred original articles, editorials, and discussions. He was in a unique position to write the Gibbon biography by virtue of their long and close friendship. |
|
