DEAR Tin Man. If you really want a heart, forget the Wizard of Oz. Head instead to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington DC. There you will find a dazzling history of artificial hearts, some of which are now available to see online.
It may resemble a tea trolley, but this enormous contraption is one of the earliest heart-lung machines. Designed to temporarily stand in for the heart, these pumped blood around the body until the real one was up to the job again. Called the Mayo-Gibbon heart-lung machine, it was built in 1957.
The owl-like device, pictured here, also bypasses the heart and lungs during operations, giving surgeons a "dry field" to work on. The Dodrill GMR was developed in 1952 by General Motors in Detroit, Michigan.
Here we have a more modern device – a real replacement heart, made from plastic and titanium. Robert Tools was the first recipient of the AbioCor heart, in an operation on 2 July 2001 in the Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky. Fourteen people received AbioCor hearts before the company behind them, Abiomed, shifted to making the smaller Impella hearts now used.
The take-home message? No wizards required.
See more artificial hearts at bit.ly/1bc3bwc.
This article appeared in print under the headline "Be still my beating heart"
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