1958 - Medicine

Medicine

The Bird Universal Medical Respirator invented by Stoughton, Mass.-born engineer Forrest M. Bird, 37, will come into widespread use for acute and chronic cardiopulmonary care. Bird will devise a "Babybird" respirator in 1970.

Buffalo-born inventor Wilson Greatbatch, 37, implants a prototype cardiac pacemaker in a dog May 7 at the Buffalo Veterans Administration Hospital with help from the hospital's chief of surgery (see Hyman, 1932). Having accidentally loaded the wrong resistor into equipment that monitors heart sounds, Greatbatch has noticed that the device gave off a pulse that mimicked a heartbeat. The dog's bodily fluids leak through the electrical tape used to seal the device, and it shorts out after 4 hours, but Greatbatch will create a casing to prevent such leakage and shield the heart from battery chemicals; he will build 50 pacemakers in a barn behind his house as he works to improve his design.

The first successful human cardiac pacemaker is implanted under the skin of Swedish engineer Arne H. W. Larsson, 43, at Stockholm (see 1889). Scarring from a viral infection has disrupted the normal electrical circuit that links the heart chambers, his fainting spells (Stokes-Adams attacks) are potentially fatal (he has had to be resuscitated 20 to 30 times per day), heart surgeon Ake Senning opens his chest wall October 8 to implant a battery-powered silicon-transistor device weighing less than three ounces that electrically stimulates Larsson's heart rhythms. Devised by inventor Rune Elmqvist, now 52, and powered by rechargeable zinc-mercury batteries, the pacemaker provides regular, mild, electric shocks that stimulate contractions that restore heartbeat normality, and although it fails 8 hours later and has to be recharged every 3 to 4 hours, it will work on and off for 3 years; Larsson will undergo 25 operations and procedures over the next 40 years to replace pacemakers that have failed for one reason or another but he will live to age 86, and pacemakers will have been much improved and made safer. The devices will not gain general acceptance in the United States for another 7 or 8 years (see 1972).

Project HOPE (Health Opportunities for People Everywhere) is founded by Brooklyn-born Georgetown University cardiologist William B. (Bertalan) Walsh, 38, who served as a medical officer aboard a destroyer in World War II and saw South Pacific children dying for lack of simple medical care (see 1960). President Eisenhower has appointed him co-chair of a committee as part of his People-to-People program for developing nations (see hospital ship, 1960).

AARP (initially American Association of Retired Persons) is founded by San Francisco-born retired Los Angeles high school principal Ethel Percy Andrus, 73, who resigned in 1944 to nurse her invalid mother, lived on a pension of $50 per month, and in 1947 started the National Retired Teachers Association to lobby for better funding of pension systems. She established a retirement home for teachers at Ojai 4 years ago, started a mail-order pharmaceutical program to provide prescription medicines at low cost, has approached dozens of insurance companies about providing lost-cost health and accident insurance for people over 65, and has finally found one (New York-based Continental Casualty Co.) willing to assume that risk (see Medicare, 1964).

Syanon opens in a rented storefront at Ocean Park, Calif., where Toledo, Ohio-born recovering alcoholic Charles (Edwin) "Chuck" Dederich, 44, uses a $33 unemployment check to start weekly discussion groups with friends from the 22-year-old Alcoholics Anonymous in an effort to rehabilitate alcoholics and drug addicts. "Crime is stupid, delinquency is stupid, and the use of narcotics is stupid," Dederich will say. "What Syanon is dealing with is addiction to stupidity." He adopts the name syanon after an addict stumbles over the words seminar and symposium, gives up, and comes out with the new word; incorporated under that name September 15 as a nonprofit California foundation with 40 members, Syanon uses as its premise the conviction that addicts are not adults and that efforts to cure them with adult procedures are doomed to fail. Discarding AA's emphasis on faith in God's help, it evolves a new form of attack therapy that will revolutionize rehabilitation programs. "Today is the first day of the rest of your life," says Dederich to addicts, and Syanon communities will be established in several parts of the United States, Puerto Rico, and England as drug abuse increases (see 1980; Phoenix House, 1967).

Acupuncture is used for the first time as an anesthetic after nearly 5,000 years of use in medical therapy in China (see 2700 B.C.).

Psychoanalyst Ernest Jones dies of cancer at Cardiff February 11 at age 79; penicillin production pioneer Andrew J. Moyer at St. Petersburg, Fla., February 17 at age 58; behavioral psychiatrist John Broadus Watson at New York September 25 at age 80.