Henry Opitek (January 6, 1911 – March 13, 1981) became the first patient to survive open heart surgery in 1952. On July 3, 1952, Opitek, a 41-year-old male suffering from shortness of breath, made medical history at

Harper University Hospital Harper University Hospital is one of eight hospitals and institutes that compose the Detroit Medical Center. Harper offers services in a broad range of clinical areas, including cardiology, neurology, neurosurgery, organ transplant, plastic surge ...

Michigan Michigan () is a state in the Great Lakes region of the upper Midwestern United States. With a population of nearly 10.12 million and an area of nearly , Michigan is the 10th-largest state by population, the 11th-largest by area, and the ...

. The Dodrill-GMR heart machine, considered by some to be the first operational

mechanical heart An artificial heart is a device that replaces the heart. Artificial hearts are typically used to bridge the time to heart transplantation, or to permanently replace the heart in the case that a heart transplant (from a deceased human or, experi ...

was successfully used while performing heart surgery on Opitek. Dr.

Forest Dewey Dodrill Forest Dewey Dodrill (January 26, 1902 – June 28, 1997) was a medical doctor at Harper University Hospital at Wayne State University in Michigan who performed the first successful open heart surgery using a mechanical pump. Biography Dodrill wa ...

, a surgeon at Wayne State University's Harper Hospital in Detroit, used the machine to bypass Opitek's

left ventricle A ventricle is one of two large chambers toward the bottom of the heart that collect and expel blood towards the peripheral beds within the body and lungs. The blood pumped by a ventricle is supplied by an atrium, an adjacent chamber in the upper ...

for 50 minutes while he opened the patient's

left atrium The atrium ( la, ātrium, , entry hall) is one of two upper chambers in the heart that receives blood from the circulatory system. The blood in the atria is pumped into the heart ventricles through the atrioventricular valves. There are two atr ...

and worked to repair the

mitral valve The mitral valve (), also known as the bicuspid valve or left atrioventricular valve, is one of the four heart valves. It has two cusps or flaps and lies between the left atrium and the left ventricle of the heart. The heart valves are all one-w ...

. In Dodrill's post operative report he notes, "To our knowledge, this is the first instance of survival of a patient when a

mechanism was used to take over the complete body function of maintaining the blood supply of the body while the heart was open and operated on."

References

1911 births 1981 deaths Cardiac surgery {{US-med-bio-stub