The Matter of the Heart by Thomas Morris

Author:Thomas Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

9. CLINICAL TRIAL BY MEDIA

Salt Lake City, 2 December 1982

In 1882 a bored young doctor in colonial India passed the long hours between consultations by writing a ghoulish short story about an artificial heart. Ronald Ross had yearned to be a poet, but his father insisted that he study medicine. It was the right decision, since Ross became the world’s leading expert in tropical diseases, later winning a Nobel Prize for his discovery that malaria was transmitted by mosquitoes. Written when Ross was twenty-five but unpublished until long after his death, ‘The Vivisector Vivisected’ is a chilling tale about a physiologist who seeks to bring the dead back to life. He creates a mechanical heart, a pump which is filled with donkey blood, and successfully uses it to revive a cadaver. In true Gothic tradition the action reaches its macabre climax as a thunderstorm rages outside the dilapidated laboratory: the hapless scientist and his colleague realise that having started to pump they cannot stop without killing their experimental subject, who in a cruel twist turns out to be the physiologist’s brother. After hours of frantic pumping they become exhausted and are forced to abandon their hopeless task, as the briefly resuscitated corpse breathes his last for the second time.1

Ross’s story may not be great literature, but it shows remarkable vision. As a physiologist he understood the inherent difficulties of creating a device to replace the heart, and the contraption he imagined anticipated the work of researchers many decades later. His narrator describes a ‘double kind of pump’: a pneumatically powered contrivance like two bicycle pumps connected together, each operating at a different pressure to mimic the heart’s left and right ventricles, and equipped with valves to ensure the blood flows in one direction. Strangely it was exactly a century later – in December 1982 – that a device strikingly similar in conception, consisting of two plastic pumps powered by air, was implanted into the chest of a retired dentist from Utah – the first time a human had been given a permanent artificial heart. The realisation of Ross’s idea was a landmark operation, but deeply controversial; few judged it a success, and relentless press attention ensured that a distasteful melodrama was played out to an audience of millions.

The project to build an artificial heart had begun in a spirit of huge optimism, and was blessed with cutting-edge technology, generous financial support and the keenest scientific minds. In 1968 a government report predicted that within twenty years artificial hearts would become the second largest industry in America, with thousands of patients receiving them each year.2 It was soon apparent that this forecast was well wide of the mark, and that the difficulties of constructing such a device were greater than anybody had imagined. An endeavour which had begun promisingly descended into acrimony, blighted by accusations of malpractice, industrial espionage and theft. It was not until the 1990s that the ‘total artificial heart’ became a widely accepted therapy, and although it has scored several notable successes, fewer than 2,000 have ever been fitted.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.