History of Heart Surgery Timeline

In 1925, Henry Souttar operated successfully on a young woman with mitral valve stenosis. This was the first successful operation on the heart valves, though the technique was not widely adopted for years afterward.

In 1947, Thomas Sellors of Middlesex Hospital in London operated on a Tetralogy of Fallot patient with pulmonary stenosis and successfully divided the stenosed pulmonary valve, demonstrating that congenital valve defects could be surgically corrected.

Also in 1948, four surgeons carried out successful operations for mitral valve stenosis resulting from rheumatic fever. These landmark procedures established valve surgery as a viable treatment for rheumatic heart disease.

Image source: Mitral stenosis

In 1948, Russell Brock, probably unaware of Sellors's work, used a specially designed dilator in three cases of pulmonary stenosis, independently advancing the surgical treatment of pulmonary valve obstruction.

Image source: Russell Brock, Baron Brock

In 1978, Victor Skumin described Skumin syndrome, a 'cardioprosthetic psychopathological syndrome' associated with mechanical heart valve implants, characterized by irrational fear, anxiety, depression, sleep disorder, and weakness. It highlighted the psychological dimension of prosthetic valve surgery.

Image source: Victor Skumin

In 1945, Soviet pathologist Nikolai Sinitsyn successfully transplanted a heart from one frog to another frog and from one dog to another dog, providing early experimental groundwork for future organ transplantation efforts.

Christiaan Barnard performed the world's first human-to-human heart transplant on Louis Washkansky on December 3, 1967, at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa. The operation made history worldwide despite Washkansky's death from pneumonia 18 days later.

Image source: Christiaan Barnard

Barely three days after Barnard's transplant, Adrian Kantrowitz performed the first pediatric heart transplant on December 6, 1967, at Maimonides Hospital (now Maimonides Medical Center) in Brooklyn, New York.

Norman Shumway performed the first adult heart transplant in the United States on January 6, 1968, at Stanford University Hospital. Shumway's later work established Stanford as a leading center for cardiac transplantation.

In July 1952, Forest Dodrill was the first to use a mechanical pump in a human to bypass the left side of the heart whilst allowing the patient's lungs to oxygenate the blood, in order to operate on the mitral valve. It was a major step toward mechanical circulatory support.

In 1953, John Heysham Gibbon of Jefferson Medical School in Philadelphia reported the first successful use of extracorporeal circulation by means of an oxygenator. Although he abandoned the method after subsequent failures, his heart-lung machine became foundational to modern cardiac surgery.

Image source: John Heysham Gibbon

In 1954, Walton Lillehei performed a series of successful operations using the controlled cross-circulation technique, in which the patient's mother or father served as a living 'heart-lung machine'. This bold approach enabled intracardiac repair before reliable mechanical bypass existed.

On February 25, 1960, Nazih Zuhdi performed the first total intentional hemodilution open-heart surgery on Terry Gene Nix, age 7, at Mercy Hospital in Oklahoma City. The technique reduced the need for donor blood in heart-lung machines.

In March 1961, Zuhdi, Carey, and Greer performed open-heart surgery on a child aged three and a half using the total intentional hemodilution machine, further validating the technique in pediatric patients.