Dr. John Heysham Gibbon: Inventor of the Heart Lung Machine

John Heysham Gibbon was one of the most influential surgeons of the 1900s. He was most known for his two major accomplishments: the first person to operate open-heart surgery and the inventor of the heart-lung machine. Born in 1903, Gibbon came from a long line of physicians and attended Princeton College before he was sixteen years old. He finished medical school in 1927. One internship and fellowship later he worked as the Assistant Professor of Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania. However, his most notable work wouldn't come till much later.

A career-changing event happened in 1930 where he operated on a woman who was apneic which is the cessation of breathing. Gibbon performed surgery on her and removed a blood clot from her artery in her chest and placed a clamp down in under 7 minutes. Unfortunately, this patient died but this surgery gave Gibbon the idea of a machine that could oxygenate deoxygenated blood and pump it back into the patient's system, bypassing the heart all together. This would be known as the heart-lung machine also known as the cardiopulmonary bypass machine.

Gibbon worked with his wife and experimented on cats. In 1935, they were able to use a machine to replace the cat’s heart for up to twenty minutes. Unfortunately, most of the cats died less than a month after surgery. Dogs were also used to experiment on which taught Gibbon that he needed to add filters to the machine to prevent blood from clotting and different suctions to make sure air did not intervene in the surgery. Once most dogs started to survive the surgery he was given permission to build a heart lung machine for humans in 1950. 

1953 marked a very important milestone for Gibbon where he performed his first successful surgery with the heart lung machine on a human: Cecilia Bavolek. Her heart was replaced by the machine for 45 minutes. There was still a major flaw, though; the heart was still beating which allowed some blood to reach it. Experiments revealed that the heart could be stopped for fifteen minutes but it simply wasn't enough time for more major surgeries. 

Gibbon retired in 1967 and died in 1973, but his work lives on. In the 1980s other researchers found the solution to Gibbon’s problem. The heart could be cooled below 28 degrees celsius with certain chemicals which allowed it to be stopped for hours at a time, making many cardiac surgeries possible. In the end, Dr. Gibbon’s successful invention of the heart lung machine paved the way for our modern use of it in the surgical field today.

Written by Jada Gadoros at Incisionary

APA References

Theruvath, T. P., & Ikonomidis, J. S. (2014). Historical perspectives of The American Association for Thoracic Surgery: John H. Gibbon, Jr (1903-1973). The Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, 147(3), 833–836. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtcvs.2013.11.007

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Gibbon, J. H., & Hill, J. D. (1982). Part I. The Development of the First Successful Heart-Lung Machine. The Annals of Thoracic Surgery, 34(3), 337–341. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0003-4975(10)62507-6

‌History of the heart-lung machine. (2025). Understanding Animal Research. https://www.understandinganimalresearch.org.uk/human-diseases/history-of-the-heart-lung-machine