Over the past century, heart operations that once were unthinkable have become commonplace. Thousands of times a day, ...

Dr. John Gibbon invented the heart-lung machine and used it to perform the world’s first successful open-heart surgery on May 6, 1953. Dr. John Gibbon was a researcher and surgeon at Jefferson Medical ...

Before heart-lung machines were available, some early heart operations were made possible just by cooling patients, which gave surgeons a brief window to operate. All the pieces of the puzzle started ...