Welcome to the wild West of American medicine.

I'm Chris Pine in This is Cardiac Cowboys, the gripping true story behind the birth of open heart surgery and the Maverick surgeons who made it happen.

Lymon Glidden is still conscious when they wheel him into the operating room.

He's thirty nine years old, rugged and strong from years spent working in the iron mines of northern Minnesota.

He's as healthy as they come.

But Lyman's health isn't the reason he's here today.

A few feet away from Lyman's operating table is a scrawny, thirteen month old boy who lies unconscious on a second operating table.

This is Gregory, the youngest of Lyman's ten children.

Gregory was born with a whole in his heart, the likes of which no child has ever survived.

He's about to have open heart surgery.

The problem is this is nineteen fifty four, and outside of these walls, the field of open heart surgery doesn't exist.

The anesthesiologist begins hand pumping cyclopropane gas into Lyman's lungs.

As he feels himself slipping out of consciousness, his eyes drift to the small machine that sits between him and his son, Gregory.

It's a prototype built with scavenged parts from a dairy pump and plastic beer tubes, and never before tested on a human patient.

The machine was designed to circulate blood between a parent and child during open heart surgery.

If it works, it might just save Gregory from a slow and agonizing death.

If it doesn't, it could kill.

Not just Gregory, but his father too.

There rarely were no edisons, no devices, and no procedures that could help a patient more than minimally.

In the fifties, that's cardiologist doctor J.

Phillip Saul.

All a cardiologist could do was take a picture and diagnose.

They couldn't treat anything.

In the early nineteen fifties, young families around the world faced a medical crisis.

Thanks to the baby boom.

Infants were being born in higher numbers than ever before in history.

Millions of them suffered from congenital heart defects.

Children's wards were filled with kids who'd never lived to see adulthood.

Just like Gregory Glidden, these children gasped for breath, their tiny chests pounding with heart murmurs.

It could feel through their ribs.

Their desperate parents drove them back and forth to local hospitals for bouts of pneumonia and heart failure, but there was nothing the doctors could do for them.

The solution lay in a new field of medicine.

Before nineteen fifty, surgeons considered the living heart off limits.

Less than twenty years later, doctors weren't just transplanting hearts, they were building artificial ones.

The maverick surgeons who blazed this trail wouldn't come from the Ivy League or the great European medical institutions.

They were a motley crowd.

Doctors scattered across the Midwest in Texas, forged in the crucible of World War II.

Commanders of their earliest mash units.

They came back ready to take on the next great fight of their lives.

For the next two decades, these heart surgeons competed and feuded, racing to.

Be the first, the best, the most prolific.

Some appeared on the covers of Time and Life magazine, operated on kings, and advised presidents.

Others ended up disgraced, penniless, convicted unfelony charges.

To get they ignited a revolution in medicine.

He removed the heart from a twenty five year old girl and transplanted into the chest of a fifty five.

Year old man.

All of the men waging the battle are the bake Dan Cooley and Houston.

Doctor C.

W.

Lellahigh, the surgeon who keptained the research team and performed.

The operation, Thomas Edison, Walter Reid, and Jonas Salk.

Today we gather to recognize that Michael de Bakey's name belongs among them.

We welcome doctor Christian Barnard.

Who were these daring surgeons who willed an entire medical field into existence?

How did they achieve so much in such a short.

Span of time, and why his history left them behind?

Formoso's Studios.

This is Cardiac Cowboys, a podcast about life, death and innovation in the American heartland.

Episode one, the starting gun.

For the last two years, writer and executive producer Jamie Napley is tracked down what remains of the Cardiac Cowboys.

He interviewed the living surgeons, their patients, and their families to bring you this story.

Here's Jamie Napley.

Throughout history, the heart has been thought of as the seat of the soul, the source of romantic love.

A heart can be heavy or heard melted or broken.

But all the heart does really is pump blood.

Dark rust colored blood, starved of oxygen, flows into the right side of the heart.

From there it's pumped to the lungs.

When the blood returns, it's bright crimson and oxygen rich.

Left side of the heart then pumps it through the aorta and out to the rest of the body.

And it does this over and over again, one hundred thousand times a day.

But for the one in every hundred children born with the defect, it doesn't work that way.

Holes in the atria the upper chambers, or the ventricles the lower chambers, allow the oxygenated and deoxygenated blood to mix, forcing the heart and lungs to work harder.

Imagine trying to drink water through a straw with a hole in it.

Surgeons hypothesized that some of these holes could be sown shut with a few carefully placed sutures.

But there's a problem.

The hardest pumping blood at five liters a minute, and you open it up and it is still working.

It's a blood path.

That's medical historian and plastic surgeon doctor Gerald Imber.

For two thousand years, since the time of Apocrates, the rule has been you don't mess with the heart, because if you touch the heart, you kill the patient.

In the nineteen forties, when C.

Walton Lillehigh and F.

John Lewis were starting out at the University of Minnesota, no surgeon dared to cut into the living heart.

Every year, thousands of newborn infants were condemned to live short, excruciating lives.

All that was about to change.

In less than a decade.

Lillhigh and Lewis would overturn thousands of years of convention and open the door to a dangerous new frontier of medicine.

We have with her mooring the falling out.

By December seventh, nineteen forty one, like many American boys, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, U of M medical school classmates, Walt Lillehigh and John Lewis signed up together for the Army Reserve.

They were activated on the same day.

After the war, they returned to their alma mater to begin their surgical residencies.

It was a special time in the history of surgery.

That's an archival recording of John Lewis.

Due to the Army experienced, blood transusions became much safer than they were, and his caesiology became much better than it was.

Things became possible it's never been possible before.

As friends, Lillehigh and Lewis made for an odd pair.

Lewis was tall and lanky, with warm features, horn rimmed glasses, and a bow tie permanently fixed to his collar.

Lilahigh, stocky with slicked back hair, had a gaze so piercing it would stop people in their tracks.

Lewis was witty and intellectual.

He spent his time outside of the hospital writing poems, painting still lifes, and playing classical music.

Lilahigh preferred drinking at an all night jazz club.

If Louis was butch cassidy for bose and funny, Lilahigh, reserved and chillingly intense, was the sundance kid.

He had the most beautiful color of stilly blue eyes, so intense that you were just mesmerized immediately.

I was always just totally smitten by him.

That's Sea Bollman, a nurse who worked with Walt Lillahigh.

He absolutely was fascinated about how things fit together and how things actually work.

Lilla High was a born tinkerer.

As a child, when his parents refused to help him buy a motorcycle, Lilla High started building his own from spare parts.

By fourteen, he had at least three different bikes that he'd zip around on through the Minneapolis suburbs.

He met his future wife, Kay Lindberg when she was working as a nurse at the Minneapolis General Hospital.

Kay found him intense and very much a loner, but she was attracted to how this strong, silent type could show so much empathy for his patience.

It's really what drew my mother to him.

That's Walt and Kay's son, Doctor Craig Lilihi.

Dad was a compassion man and not an outwardly or a showy sort of way.

She remembers him as an intern and resident to sitting down at the bedside and talking with families.

The U of M Hospital wasn't particularly well regarded in the early fifties, but for those in the know, this was where all of the most exciting cardiovascular developments in the world were taking place.

Lille High and Lewis's boss, doctor Owen Wangenstein, had spent the last two decades revamping the surgical department according to his own wildly ambitious vision.

Wangenstein aimed for nothing less than the Nobel Prize.

To that end, he recruited an eclectic team of brilliant young surgeons from all over the country, tinkerers, outside the box, thinkers, and rule breakers.

Here's doctor Gerald Imber again.

Owen Wangenstein was the chief of surgery at Minnesota, and in nineteen forty nine he established a department of cardiac surgery.

When there was no such thing as cardiac surgery.

Wangenstein wanted his surgeons to define the future of medicine.

In his mind, that future lay in the living heart.

All of the early attempts at open heart surgery ended with patients dead on the operating table.

In nineteen fifty two, Wangenstein asked thirty five year old John Lewis to take up the gauntlet.

Lewis would lead the department's pioneering attempt at open heart surgery, but first he'd need to find a way to keep his young patients from bleeding out mid operation.

He became fascinated by a technique called hypothermia.

I was sitting beside him actually at that meaning.

The presentation was by doctor William Biglow from Toronto, Canada.

That's an archival recording of Walt Lillehigh.

He had pointed out that the limit the brain could go without blood safely was four minutes, but you could double that time if you reduced the body of temperature put in the brain.

He felt that that was ample time for the simple defect inside the heart.

Doctor Lewis and I and both in the audience were very impressed, but we said that's a place to be young.

On a chilli morning in September nineteen fifty two, Lewis brought five year old Jacqueline Johnson into the operating room to lower her body temperature.

Lewis wrapped Jacqueline in a rubber cooling blanket for two hours.

Nurses monitored her temperature closely.

If it dropped too low, her heart could fibrillate, its rhythm growing fast and out of sync in a time before clinically available to fibrillators.

This would be a death sentence for young Jacqueline Johnson.

When the thermometer hit twenty eight degrees centigrade, Jacqueline was laid out on the operating table.

At this temperature, Lewis estimated her brain needed about fifty percent less ox and the normal.

Flanked by his assistants Richard Varko and Walt Lilleheigh.

Lewis raised his scalpel and sliced into her chest.

The incisions used for those early operations were all horizontal.

That's cardiac surgeon doctor Eric Rose.

They required division of multiple muscles to get through, division of arteries, which now are very important to leave for later.

Use and painful.

These were primitive incisions.

Jacqueline had been tentatively diagnosed with an ASD, an atrial septal defect, the simplest kind to repair, but the surgeons wouldn't be able to confirm the diagnosis until they saw for themselves.

After spreading the ribs and exposing the pericardium, surgeons need to do an incision in order to see the actual heart.

The heart itself is completely exposed.

At that point, Lewis conjectured that hypothermia bought him about eight minutes before Jacqueline suffered permanent brain damage.

Eight minutes to enter the heart, locate the whole, sew it shut, and then resuscitate her.

The surgeons clamped off the blood vessels leading into and out of Jacqueline's heart.

When it stopped beating, Lewis made his first incision.

As he spread open the heart wall, he could see immediately that the diagnosis was correct.

There was a small hole in the heart's upper chamber.

He quickly and carefully sewed it shut, and then Lilla High and Varco rushed to restart Jacqueline's heart.

But after the clamps were removed from her blood vessels, her heart still refused to pump blood.

Louis began massaging it with his hands, and then it started to beat on its own.

Here's Walt Lilla High again.

I remember looking at but the clift.

It was about ten minutes to ten point.

The heart took over.

I said, this is it, John, We're into the art to state.

John Lewis had just performed the first successful open heart operation in history.

He was thrust into the spotlight, and over the next year he performed a series of ASD repairs using hypothermia.

Lilihigh was happy for his friend.

By all accounts, the man didn't have a jealous bone in his body, but he saw a problem.

Hypothermia requires being able to do things exceedingly fast.

You could do surgery inside the heart closing relatively simple defects, but any more complex procedure really was not doable reproducibly.

Across the street from the o RS where Lillihigh and Lewis worked stood the brand new Variety Club Heart Hospital.

At the time, it was the only medical institution in the world dedicated to the heart, and its children's ward was overflowing with sick kids suffering from more complex defects no doctor could fix, at least not using hypothermia.

John Lewis had taken the first step into the new frontier of open heart surgery, but Lilahi could see that to make any more progress, a new approach was needed, and children would continue to die by the thousands until he found it.

Two hundred miles north of Minneapolis, a rugged mine worker named Lyman Glitton and his wife Francis, gave birth to their tenth child, a boy.

They named him Gregory.

Like many parents in the nineteen fifties, and Frances already had one child with a congenital heart defect.

But Donna, we called her Donna.

Nobody really talked a lot about her affliction, which was a hole in her heart.

That's Shirley Gliddon'spinelli, the fourth of Lyman and Francis's children.

She was not able to go to school because she just didn't have the energy to go.

Donna and I slept in the same bed, and we'd actually sleep with our arms around each other.

We just were very, very close as sisters.

Once Saturday morning, my mother she looked in our room and I don't know what she noticed, but she cried for my dad.

Chick Chick that was his nickname.

My sister Donna had died during the night.

She looked so peaceful.

I was not aware.

I was what ten or eleven years old laying there next to her, and she had already died.

In the spring of nineteen fifty three, when baby Gregory began showing similar symptoms to his sister LaDonna, Lyman and Francis feared the worst.

It would be months before doctors confirmed what the parents already knew.

Gregory had a hole in his heart.

Left untreated, it would kill him, just like it did his sister.

The Glittons were lucky, they were told in that they lived just a day's drive from the only city in the world where doctors were repairing heart defects like Gregory's.

They made the trek down to the Variety Club Heart Hospital, where they heard all about the miracles being performed by the Great John Lewis.

But when Gregory underwent a heart catheterization, Lyman and Francis were told that, like most of the children at the hospital, their son's defect was too complex to be fixed.

There was nothing John Lewis could do for them.

In his laboratory across the street, Walt Lillihigh was working tirelessly on a miracle of his own.

The pace of medical progress is often slow and plodding, but time was something Gregory Gliddon didn't have, and neither did Walt Lillehigh.

Three years earlier, Lillahigh had noticed a small rubbery bump by his left ear.

He had another surgeon biopsy the growth and sent it to a pathologist.

The results would change his and his wife, Kay's lives forever.

Here's an archival recording of Kay Lillahigh.

My husband was jagnosed with nymphos sarcoma.

I remember looking it up in a dictionary and sent to most fato tech answer, I need to be homely.

You know, he wasn't going to live that much.

Shiner lymphosarcoma is an obsolete term for non Hodgkin lymphoma, a rare and deadly cancer that was growing in the prodded gland in Lilahi's left cheek.

The prognosis was grim.

Lillehigh was unlikely to survive the next five years.

Surgical chief Owen Wangenstein assembled a cracked team of doctors to operate on his young protege.

On June first, nineteen fifty, Lillahi entered the OAR at the University Hospital for the first time as a patient.

Wangenstein was a particularly aggressive cancer surgeon.

That's doctor Gerald imber again.

And it was said that Wangenstein hated cancer so much because it was the only thing.

They killed more patients than he did.

Lillehi was on the table for more than ten hours.

Multiple surgeons worked on him, including his good friend John Lewis.

He did drastic surgery, ticked out that kind of mass a big muscle alumnick, and then down into the chest until they were no more cancer cells.

He ended up with around nick you know.

Over the next four months, Lila High remained bedridden in the duplex he shared with Kay and their daughter Kimberly, just a short drive from the university.

But even as he struggled to recover from the operation, Lila High knew there was no cure for lymphosarcoma.

How much time could he have left?

We always live with that threat.

We were at first house that we advised to I've been asking to much money.

I leave something for you.

That was the threat always.

He really believed that he was living on time.

That's doctor Craig Lillihaigh Again.

That certainly had an impact on him in realizing that the time was it was limited.

Life was a gift.

Lilihigh returned to work a changed man.

He was noticeably thinner, He'd lost muscle mass during his recovery, his head and neck were forever tilted to the side, and at age thirty two, he didn't think he'd lived to see the end of the decade if he was intensely focused on his work before now.

Postop, Lilihi's drive was peter natural.

So as the world celebrated John Lewis for curing one very particular type of heart defect, Lilihi was using every precious waking moment to do his friend one better, to find a way to buy surgeons more time inside the heart, to cure more and more complicated defects, to save the live of more dying kids, kids like Gregory Lytton.

Lillahi was having a drink with his lab assistants Herb Warden and Morley Cohen after another late night in the lab.

When the men arrived at a simple but revolutionary idea.

One of his assistants mentioned that his wife was pregnant and they were talking about the fact that in pregnancy, the placenta was providing oxygenated blood to the brain of the fetus, and then loves didn't have to do anything, and all.

Of a sudden, Lila Hijas zones out, just.

Why don't we use another animal circulation to bypass the heart so that oxygenated blood would go to the brain and you would have time to do what you needed to do.

They called it controlled cross circulation, a and heart lung machine.

Someone with a matching blood type, ideally a parent whose heart and lungs could oxygenate the child's blood while the surgeon operated.

Just like in pregnancy, a parent would act as a sort of temporary life support for their child.

Lillihigh and his assistants began scavenging for spare parts to assemble their prototype beer hose and a sigma pump utilized by the dairy industry.

These men were tinkerers.

They used whatever did the job.

People of Lola High's generation, especially the cold weather states in the Midwest, made do with what they had, and if they didn't have something, they made it themselves.

They didn't look for someone else to solve the problem.

That's ROBERTA.

Beach, a coordinator at the Variety Club Research Center.

Here you have a man who survived war, and he survived cancer, and that made him willing to do things that other people perhaps would not do.

After a successful round of tests in the animal lab, Lilli High and his team began looking for their first human candidate.

In order to prove the advantage of cross circulation over hypothermia.

Lilihigh needed a patient with a more complex defect than anything his friend John Lewis had ever attempted to fix.

He went around the hospital to try to identify a child with a serious ventricular cental defect and identified a boy named Gregory Glidden.

The couple had already lost a child, and they were certainly loath to have the child operated upon.

Lilli High spent time with the Gliddons, working to earn their trust.

He listened to their concerns and talked through the risks.

Lyman, who was a blood match for his son, would need to act as Gregory's heart lung donor there was a chance the operation could result in the deaths of both father and son.

It was a leap of faith.

They finally agreed to leave Gregory.

At the hospital for care and allow him to have surgery if they thought he was a suitable candidate.

Getting the approval of hospital administrators proved to be the far greater challenge.

Wangenstein and Lillahi shared a close bond, made closer by the disfiguring cancer operation Wangenstein had performed on him.

Wangenstein would do anything to see Lila High succeed, but there was a system in place.

John Lewis had made history a year earlier, earning the hospital publicity and a fortune in donations.

If anyone was going to attempt the much more complicated ventricular septle defect or VSD repair, it would have to be Lewis.

John Lewis was very successful fixing ASD atrial septal defects.

In fact, he was the only person in the world who was doing it for a year.

The ventricular septal defect is larger, it's more difficult to get to, and it was more time consuming.

The issue became much more complex when they attempted to fix a VSD.

Lewis's first VSD patient turned out to be a misdiagnosis.

The defect was even more complicated than anyone realized.

Lewis ran out of time trying to repair it, and the young patient died on the table.

Lewis made a second attempt, with Lilli High assisting.

The diagnosis was correct, and yet Lewis again found himself running out of time.

Lillie High was by his side and trying to help him, and Lewis began to perspire and began to panic.

He realized he was losing his patient and it just drove him to despair.

The child died, and the idea of repairing VSDs under iplothermia died with him.

In short order, Lewis's research funding was cut and Lili High's was increased.

The following year, in Lewis's words, he'd be booted out by Wangenstein.

For Lewis, it was a swift and painful coup.

He told one of his residents, it is difficult to tolerate the success of a friend.

Lilla High now had the full backing of his mentor, and he got to work.

His team would go on Saturdays down to Mayo.

That's doctor Paul Isisio, a professor at the U of M's Visible Heart Laboratories.

They watched surgery, and then they would visit Justin Edwards, who had a heart library there he can shuttle specimens.

Lili High and his team spent hours in the pungent from maldehyde suffused lab at the Mayo Clinic, just a ninety mile drive south of Minneapolis.

The cardiac pathologist there, Jesse Edwards, kept thousands of preserved human hearts in barrels, and Lilihi dug through them, studying every type of heart defect for which there existed a specimen.

Whatever he'd find beating in Gregory Glyndon's chest, he wanted to be ready for.

Back in Minneapolis, news of Lili High's procedure was causing a growing panic among the hospital administrators.

Lila High saw his chance to save Gregory's life disappearing before his eyes.

It was enormous pressure on Wangestein not to allow him to do it.

Weangestein had a visitor from Chicago, Willis Potts, a very famous PDA Patrick the surgeon said, congratulations, You're about to be the first surgeon to have a two hundred percent mortality.

It was meant, of course, as the ultimate insult.

So the administrators of the hospital, hearing some famous surgeons say oh my god, how can you do this, try to stop them from doing it.

The administrator's concerns were not unjustified.

With its beer tubes carrying blood around ther its potential for two hundred percent mortality, cross circulation seemed more carnival side show than modern medicine.

Not only could it fail, it could discredit the university.

March twenty fifth, nineteen fifty four, the day before Lilli High was scheduled to operate on Gregory Glidden, administrators stormed into the office of hospital director Ray Amberg.

They wanted to shut la High down, and Wangenstein was called in to defend his protege.

Litla Hi's future and Gregory Glyndon's life hung in the balance.

How confess, cross circulation was very much viewed as heresy.

That's doctor Craig Lillihigh again.

It was an idea that even today feels a little radical.

As Wangenstein was arguing lil High's case to the hospital director, Lila High went about his other work.

If he was anxious in the hours leading up to the operation, nobody could tell.

When Lillahigh returned to his office after performing an abdominal surgery, he found a note on his desk from Wangenstein.

Dear Walt.

It read, by all means go ahead.

By now, Gregory was thirteen months old, and he'd spent three of those months in the Variety Club Hart Hospital.

To help shed light on Gregory's experience at the hospital, here's doctor Pamela Evans.

Lila High repaired a defect in doctor Evans's heart not long after Gregory's operation.

My pediatrician told my parents about the hard hospital at Minnesota.

There was a playroom that we could play in.

I remember the children having wheelchair races.

Early on the morning of March twenty sixth, Gregory was wheeled tor number two in his crib, surrounded by his stuffed animals.

To this day, when I'm in a hospital or I have to have like a procedure or something, if I'm on the gurney, I still recall watching the lights flash by as they.

Were wheeling me to the operating room.

It's very very vivid.

Boom boom boom.

In ther Ggory was moved to an operating table as the anesthesiologist prepared the cyclopropane gas to put him under.

I know, I was really really cold.

I kept saying, mommy, mommy, I'm so cold.

I'm so cold, and I mean I had nothing on, no sheets or anything.

Once Gregory was unconscious, Lillehei began the operation.

He cut open the boy's chest and spread his ribs.

The surgeons inserted narrow tubular canulas into Gregory's aorta, as well as the superior and inferior vena cava in his neck.

Through these canulas, Gregory's blood would be diverted from his heart through plastic beer tubes into the small sigma pump and then into Lyman's blood vessels.

Threw an incision in the inner thigh, Lilihaigh gave the command pump on.

At the flip of a switch, the machine hummed to life.

Blood began to flow between father and son.

Gregory's tiny heart stopped, and Lymans picked up the slack, pumping blood for both of them.

Lilahaigh sliced into Gregory's heart, a two and a half centimeter cut into the right ventricle.

Surgeon Richard Varko pulled apart the sides of the incision, but it was too dark to see inside.

Shortly before the operation, Lili High had the idea to borrow a headlamp from an ear nose and throat doctor at the hospital.

Without the support of the sternoclidomastoid muscle in his neck, just keeping the lamp upright was a struggle for Lillihigh.

He aimed its dim beam of light into the lower chamber of Gregory's heart.

Lila High actually manually stuck his finger in and found the hall.

That's doctor Gerald Imber again.

The diagnosis, which is not always correct, was correct.

This time a child did have a ventricular septal defect.

He was able to run a series of silk sutures through it.

And here's cardiac surgeon doctor Eric Rose again.

It's remarkable that he was able to get them closed with relatively primitive needles and primitive suture material that now we take for granted entirely.

At twelve minutes and fifteen seconds past zero time, Lilihigh had soon shut the hole between Gregory's ventricles.

As the boy lay there unconscious, lili High could feel his heart beating more powerfully than it ever had in his thirteen months of life.

He closed the defect, and then he closed the heart, and then they closed the chest, and they reached over to shake one another's hands.

They had detached the father from the son.

They had a living child who was crying a normal post operative cry.

At the end of surgery, when Lyman regained consciousness, his wife Francis gave him the good news.

Every doctor they'd spoken to over the last year had told them Gregory's defect would kill him.

Walt Lillahi had just saved the boy's life.

Over the next few days, Gregory's condition steadily improved.

Lilahi was cautiously optimistic for a quick recovery, but his optimism soon faded.

Everything was wonderful until it wasn't.

He became ill.

Twice, he ran a fever.

The child Gregory needed to have a tracheostomy performed so that they could suck a mucus out of his lungs.

Gregory's health took agonizing swings over the next week.

He grew dangerously ill, with pneumonia.

Some days, his breathing and heartbeat appeared normal.

Other days he gasped for breath and didn't recognize his own parents unflagging, checking in at all hours of the night, and performing an emergency tracheostomy to help Gregory breathe, but nothing he did seemed to improve the boy's condition.

On April sixth, Gregory took one more turn for the worse.

By nine point fifteen in the morning, the boy was dead.

Walt Lilla High.

Had to do the hardest part of any surgeon's job.

He had to break the news to the family.

I would say that there are many many surgeons of that era who just in view it as part of their job to explain things and to mourn with families when they lost kids.

Whether that empathy originates with his own illness, I think it's impossible to say, But it's just an incredible gift being able to communicate and being present, just being present with those families.

Lila High's experimental procedure had ended in failure.

If the career of John Lewis were any indication, Lilli Hi's fight to cure heart defects in children would soon be at an end.

The administrators and the heads of medicine and pediatrics now really had ammunition.

They didn't want the university to be open to criticism, and they didn't want more people to die.

They thought this was a terrible idea.

But Lilihi was determined to figure out where he'd gone wrong.

After Gregory's death, he took an unusual extra step.

He asked Lyman and Francis for consent to perform an autopsy.

Lilahi looked on as the pathologist opened Gregory's chest and removed his tiny heart.

Once again, Lilihei made an decision, and Gregory's right ventricle.

He looked, and he saw that his repairs VSD repair had completely healed.

He didn't know whether to laugh or cry because there was a dead baby on the table, but he knew he had cured his problem, and the child had died from pneumonia.

Lilahei may have failed to save Gregory, but the boy's death would not be in vain.

Lilahi's procedure had worked, and it could work again if only he were given another chance.

The door to open heart surgery had just been blown wide open, but no one outside of Walt Lillaheigh knew it.

I see him as this genius in some ways, like a Vincent van Doll or something.

You know, their troubled soul, but they're trying to do the best that they can.

Sixty eight years after Gregory Glyndon's death, Pamela Evans reflects on what his family sacrifice has meant for her and for the world.

I'm seventy two years old.

I should be dead.

The loss of that child's life led me to forty four years in academia, where I impacted thousands of young adults.

I would thank them, and I would say that child not only saved me, but it saved other children as well.

At the Maple Hill Cemetery in Hibbing, Minnesota, a small headstone marks the burial site, chaired by Gregory Glidden and his sister LaDonna.

Under Gregory's name is an epitaph which reads, his little heart changed the world.

That change wouldn't come without a fight.

Willehei knew that he'd face a sharp backlash after Gregory's death.

To move forward, he'd need to take matters into his own hands.

Walt did the kind of thing that Walt always did.

He waited until he administrators out of Town.

He scheduled two more surgeries, because when something's got to be done, it's got to be done.

These next two operations would determine the future of open heart surgery.

Once news of cross circulation spread outside of Minnesota, Walt Lillehigh, a man with no experience in the spotlight, would find himself in the crosshairs of some of the most powerful figures in medicine.

It's very easy to criticize an effort that results in a dead show, very easy, But part of Walt's genius was a persistent.

Lil High's radical cross circulation procedure was the spark that ignited a revolution in heart medicine.

He'd fired the starting gun, and soon surgeons all across the world would join the race in Houston, New York, Halo Alto, and Cape Town, South Africa.

This is the story of the brilliant, fearless, and deeply flawed men and women who looked past the accepted medical wisdom of their age and reached into the future.

The doctors and nurses who risked their careers, the patients who gave their lives, the towering achievements and unimaginable sacrifices.

The rise and fall of the heart surgeon as God and the brutal Bloody an ultimately triumphant road to medical progress.

On our next episode, two of the country's most ambitious surgeons joined forces to make Houston, Texas, the new cardiovascular capital of the world, but a friendly competition turns them from close colleagues to fierce rivals next time on Cardiac Cowboys.

Cardiac Cowboys is a production of iHeart Podcasts, OsO Studios and Thirteenth Lake Media.

We're presented by Chris Pine and written and narrated by me Jamie Appley.

Our executive producers are Christina Everett for iHeart Podcasts, Dub Cornette and Jason Ross for OsO Studios.

Doctor Gerald Imber, author of Cardiac Cowboys, is the heroic invention of heart surgery, Doctor Eric A.

Rose, John Mankowitz, Joshua Paul Johnson, and myself.

James A.

Smith is our supervising producer.

Editing and sound design by Joshua Paul Johnson.

Our composer is David Mansfield.

Our cover artwork is designed by Alexander Smith.

Archival materials courtesy of the University of Minnesota Archives.

University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Special Collections, University of Rhode Island Library, and g Wayne Miller, author of the Walt Lilla High biography King of Hearts, the true story of the maverick who pioneered open heart surgery.

For more information on the first cardiac surgeons, check out doctor Gerald Imber's book Cardiac Cowboys, The Heroic Invention of Heart Surgery.