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.

The person.

It's April twenty seventh, nineteen fifty five.

Walt lilla High waits to be called on stage.

He's at one of the countless medical conferences to which he's been invited to speak since his breakthrough.

It's been a little over a year since Lillahi used cross circulation to repair a whole in Gregory Gliddon's heart, and it's been five years since he was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Despite the bleak prognosis, Lillahi refuses to undergo a second look operation.

He doesn't need another doctor to tell him how much time he has left.

Lelehigh already lives each day like it could be his last.

He takes the stage and begins to describe his controversial technique, a child and parent sharing blood while the child undergoes open heart surgery.

Since he operated on Gregory Glidden, lilla High has performed over three dozen of these cross circulation procedures toward the end of the presentation, he makes his big announcement.

Lilla High has successfully repaired six cases of tetrology of Fallow, one of the deadliest and most complex heart defects to cardiac surgeons in the nineteen fifties.

This is the holy Grail.

In spite of his unprecedented success, Lila Hi has come to expect criticism, and he gets his fair share of it today.

Here's an archival recording of Walt Lillahi.

I could understand the skeptician because of that.

Every new idea is good, but it didn't bother us because we knew we were on the right track.

Today in the audience sits Alfred Blaylock and Helen Tausig at JOHNS Hopkins.

A decade earlier, doctor Blaylock, doctor Tausig, and a lab technician named Vivian Thomas pioneered an ingenious blue baby operation that allowed children born with tetrology of Fillow to survive past infancy.

Lilahi has taken their work one bounding step forward, but they don't see it that way.

In a shocking scene detailed by Lilahi's former resident, doctor daniel A.

Gore, Helen Tausig stands from her seat during the Q and A in shouts this criminal must be stopped.

This reaction isn't completely unexpected.

After losing a string of patients last autumn, Lillahi overheard his own nurses whispering about him in the halls, calling him a murderer.

And then there was the case of the Thompson family.

On the morning of October fifth, nineteen fifty four, an eight year old girl named Leslieann Thompson was wheeled into an oar at the University of Minnesota Hospital.

Leslie Anne was born with a VSD, a hole between the ventricles in her heart.

Her parents, an Air Force officer named Dan Thompson, and his wife, Geraldine, had brought Leslie Anne to specialists all over the country, including pioneering vascular surgeons Michael de Bakey and Denton Cooley down in Houston, But wherever they went, the prognosis remained the same.

Leslie Anne would not survive unless the hole in her heart could be sown shut.

This brought the Thompsons to the operating room of Walt Lella High.

Doctor Varsall and I were opening the cheff of the styled, exposing to heart and to make twheeled the mother into the main room.

Geraldine was a blood match for her daughter.

She happily volunteered to lend her heart and lungs to keep leslie and alive during surgery.

As Lilahi prepared to cut into the eight year old girl's heart, two of his assistants tended to Geraldine, who lay just six feet away.

An anesthesiologist entered the oar and approached Geraldine's table.

Because she had an IVY get one of the armed veins to give dan a see it.

He saw it was a dripping.

He thought the vein it plugged up, so he put a sixty big squeezes on that stump.

And loan behold IV was not dripping because the bottle was empty.

The anesthesiologist had just squeezed a massive air embulace into Geraldine's bloodstream.

A bubble of air was surging straight toward her heart.

All of a sudden they yelled something wrong, be wrong, And when they screamed, I dropped my instrument and turning through the blood turned black.

Lila High aborted the operation immediately as his assistants injected Geraldine with adrenaline and brought her blood pressure back to normal.

Lila High closed Leslianne's chest without repairing her heart, and then went out to give her father the news.

Geraldine, a lively mother of four who enjoyed dancing, swimming, and playing golf, had just suffered permanent brain damage.

For the rest of her life, she'd be unable to care for her children or herself.

This was the horrific realization of every critic's worst fear.

With cross circulation, it could end Lilla High's career, and it could bring the hospital to champion his work crashing down with him.

The situation needed to be handled delicately, but Lilahi was not a delicate man.

He was blunt and empathetic to a fault.

Dan, you have to sue us, he told the grieving husband.

Lilahai knew that the cost of Geraldine's care would quickly outpace Dan's modest Air Force income.

A malpractice settlement would allow Dan to continue to provide for his family.

It would also put.

Lilahi and his colleagues through hell, but that was a problem for another day.

For the time being, Lilahi was focused on the work ahead of him.

The tragedy of Geraldine Thompson offered irrefutable proof that cross circulation was not a permanent solution.

There had to be another way to oxygenate a patient's blood during open heart surgery, a safer way, one that didn't endanger the life of a parent.

Well, Lilahi just had to find it.

Formoso's Studios, This is Cardiac Cowboys, a podcast about life, death and innovation in the American Heartlandic episode three, the can Opener.

Here's writer and executive producer Jamie Napley.

Back in March of nineteen fifty four, Lillihigh had hired a twenty seven year old general practitioner named Richard Dwall.

Though he graduated from the u of M Medical School, Dwall's grades didn't quite meet the standards of a typical resident under Chief Owen Wangenstein, wiry with glasses and close cropped hair.

Duwall was a born tinkerer.

Lila High took an instant liking to him, and he offer for him the only job the department could afford.

The Wall left behind his GP work and started as an animal attendant in Lilla High's lab.

Months later, when the need for an alternative to cross circulation became apparent, Lilla High brought the problem to Richard Dwall.

After a case one day of cross circulation.

I was just talking to Walt and he was saying, well, it's obvious that we need a replacement for the donor.

That's an archival recording of doctor de Wall.

He said, now, if that interests you, that would be a big project for you to work on in the lab.

He gave it to me as an option, but this is a walstonerosity.

He didn't force anything anyway.

Neither did doctor Wangenstein.

He said, here's an opportunity.

Take it, run with it if you want, if you don't fail.

The idea of a heart lung bypass machine was not a new one.

As far back as the nineteen thirties.

A Philadelphia surgeon named John Gibbon and his wife Mary had been developing something called a screen oxygenator.

In nineteen thirty five, they used it to bypass a cat's heart for half an hour, but it would take another eighteen years and the backing of IBM before their wildly expensive, brand piano sized machine was ready for human use.

After one successful case and five tragic failures, John and Mary Gibbon abandoned the pursuit for good.

In nineteen fifty one, a Minnesota surgeon named Clarence Dennis experimented with his own bypass machine based on John Gibbons blueprints.

A thirty two year old Walt Lillehigh was in the room when Dennis attempted to fix the damaged heart of two year old Cheryl Judge.

Lillehigh could see how cumbersome Dennis's machine was.

It required a team of of sixteen surgeons, technicians, and nurses just to function.

His heart lung machine was very complicated that it weighed about one thousand pounds and it would fill a one car garage with the pumps and the elaborage system you need to auctionate blood.

In lilla High's estimation, the more moving parts, the more room for error.

But Lilihaigh was a lowly junior surgeon at the time, so his opinions didn't count for much.

Lilihaigh watched as a technician's error caused the machine to pump air into Cheryl's bloodstream, similarly to what would happen to Geraldine Thompson three years later.

The air bubbles blocked the flow of blood to the girl's vital organs.

Within hours, Cheryl Judge was dead.

It was Clarence Dennis's second attempt at open heart surgery, and his second dead patient be years before he tried again.

So as Lilahei met with his young protege, Richard d Wall, making plans for a new kind of bypass machine, he emphasized simplicity above all else.

Lilihi wanted his machine to be foolproof, so.

I told Dick we needed a simple auctionator.

Each sterilizable, disposable.

Every heart lung bypass machine works in essentially the same way.

Dark oxygen depleted blood is taken out of the patient.

Before it enters the heart.

The bypass machine then, through any number of methods, oxygenates the blood and then returns it to the patient's arteries.

Both Gibbons and Dennis's machines used rotating disks or cylinders to spread the blood out into a thin film, exposing it to as much oxygen as possible.

As a result, their machines needed to be massive for simplicity's sake, Lillihigh opted for a different approach, bubbles.

Doctor Lillie had a couple of admonitions for me.

Said, well, if you're going to work on this project.

I suggest you avoid libraries, avoidant literature search, because who wants you to be prejudiced by the mistakes of others.

Lillehi may have advised Dwall against library research to help him keep an open mind, but there was another reason as well.

Here's doctor Lillie High.

Again bumbling oxygen into blood to oxygenate.

It was the one method that every single authority said would not work.

Chill everybody with air embolism.

Well, I knew this, of course, but I didn't tell if t well.

Oxygen bubbles in the bloodstream had killed two year old Cheryl Judge and caused permanent brain damage for Gerald Thompson.

Many experts believed a bypass machine that introduced bubbles into the bloodstream on purpose was a terrible idea, But the Wall didn't know all that, so he threw himself headlong into the task assigned to him.

The prototype that he wheeled into Lillahi's lab in early nineteen fifty five was a lot smaller than any bypass machine in history, but it didn't exactly inspire confidence.

It was Goldberg type of apparatus.

That's University of Minnesota cardiologist doctor James Moeller.

There's a ship of austin from an usher attack would go into the blood and it bubble up to the top.

And then there was a he Bubbweiser chamber which had steel wool air, then go down a tube of our forty five degree angle, then to a spiral tube and go into the patient.

And all that was to auctionate this blood.

The Wall's prototype may have looked complicated, but it was actually quite simple.

It created bubbles to oxygenate the blood and then relied on gravity to eliminate those bubbles before returning the blood to the patient's body.

It was cheap, easily cleaned, and it didn't require a massive team to function.

It was this machine that so impressed the hot shot Houston surgeon Denton Cooley when he paid a visit to lilli High's lab.

First to Wall and then Lillihigh tested the bubble oxygenator on groups of lab dogs.

When all of the dogs were covered with perfect health, lili High was confident he'd finally found his replacement for cross circulation.

By April of nineteen fifty five, he was ready to put the oxygenator to use on a human patient.

He found an.

Ideal candidate in a three year old boy from a small coal mining village in New Brunswick, Canada, James Robshaw, like many of Lillihigh's patients, was born with a ventricular septle defect of VSD.

James's parents lacked the means to cover his travel and medical expenses.

Fortunately, a charity drive covered the cost of the boy's thousand mile journey from New Brunswick to Minneapolis.

Walt Lillihigh offered to operate pro bono on the morning of May thirteenth.

Lillihigh used his and Richard D.

Wall's bubble oxygenator to bypass James's heart.

Just like all of their test operations in the animal lab, the surgery went off without a hitch.

Lilihi successfully patched the whole in James's heart.

After months of rushed hospital visits and health scares, James's parents could finally rest easy.

Late that evening, the boy's health took a shocking turn.

For Lillihigh.

It felt like Gregory Gliddon all over again.

When James's heart stopped beating, Lillihigh and a Wall spent hours trying to resuscitate him.

By four point thirty in the morning.

There was nothing more they could do.

Lillihai made a second attempt with the bubble oxygenator.

At the end of May.

This time the young patient was healthy enough to be discharged after surgery, only to die four days later at home.

For many surgeons trying out experimental procedures, failure of this severity might signify the end of the road.

We lost patients in those days, and we operated it on one pacient a day, and often by Friday night all five patients were dead.

That's pioneering heart surgeon doctor Christian Barnard, who trained under Lilla High in the nineteen fifties.

It took a lot of guts to go back the next week and tie again and start over it again.

And as one of doctor Lillahi's porteeses that ability to go back after so much punishment and start again and believe in.

What he did.

Lilihigh was convinced that the bubble oxygenator was not at fault for the loss of these children.

An autopsy revealed that James Robshaw's death was caused by another undiagnosed heart condition, and Lila High's second patient had blood vessels that had grown out of position, so in July, Lillahigh tried yet again.

This time he operated on Jesse Weddell, a twenty two month old boy from Bayard, Iowa, who was born with tetrology of filoh.

The surgery lasted two hours and required donations of blood from sixteen of Jesse's family members and friends.

But it succeeded.

The bubble oxygenator.

Allowed Lillahigh to save Jesse Weddle's life and the life of the patient after him, and the one after that.

I just feel I feel blessed that I survived.

Doctor Pamela Evans was six years old when Walt lilla High repaired her VSD using the bubble oxygenator.

She says he waited to introduce himself to her family until after the operation.

My parents never met him before my surgery, and I have no memories of him except after my surgery.

I see that as maybe protecting his own soul and in some ways protecting my parents as well.

The children on either side of my operation both passed away, so I felt very lucky.

Before long lilla High had abandoned cross circulation forever.

Never again would he need to endanger the life of a parent to save their child.

As always, litla High's success evoked mixed reactions from the medical community.

Most people are enamored good complexity.

Look is one of the things.

That I've trought all my life.

Nobody could take some idiots but divide the lebble oxygen.

Here's Richard Dwall again.

Every bend and every curve, every piece had a purpose in it.

But if you didn't know what the purpose was, it looked rather strange and peculiar.

So you have a lot of people coming in there.

They'd look at this and say, well, this is stupid.

I can do better than that.

They'd have a change by the time they got on the plane on the way home, And of course they had disasters in their laboratories.

Just like with cross circulation, Lilla High was again struggling to garner validation for a procedure that was saving lives.

In nineteen fifty seven, he found himself at yet another medical conference listening to criticism of his and d Wall's bubble oxygenator.

A surge no one mentioned his name had tried this in a laboratory and had disaster after disaster with it.

He obviously didn't know what he was doing, and he presented this at a national meeting of very distinguished people, condemning work which was rather hurtful in its own way.

In the conference audience sat a tall, thirty six year old Texan.

During the comments section, the Texan got up and addressed the skeptical crowd with his confident Buckwheat Cooley smile.

I still laugh at it, Dent Cooley responded, how is it Minnesota?

I studied what they did there, I took it home to Texas and now have one hundred and twenty five patients that have done well with it.

That was the end of the discussion.

Two years earlier, during his visit to Lillahi's lab, Denton Cooley had recognized the ingenious simplicity of the bubble oxygenator.

After leaving Minneapolis, he and Baylor cardiologist Dan McNamara had traveled ninety miles south to the Mayo Clinic, the only other hospital performing open heart operations.

There, a surgeon by the name of John Kirkland had a bypass machine of his own based on the work of John and Mary Gibbon.

John Kirplin had this big apparatus.

This is about the fat at the table you know.

That's an archival recording of Denton Cooley.

And he had a group of cardiologists and physiologists and bio engineers in the operating room and very complicated a cordless setup.

And on the way back to Houston, doctor McNamara said, I'm not going to list your operator on any of my patients until you can duplicate John Kirkplin's program there at the Mayo Clinic with no way to duplicate that.

Kirkland's machine cost upwards of fifty thousand dollars.

Lila High and walls cost about thirty dollars adjusted for inflation.

That's the difference between half a million and a little over three hundred.

Since Cooley would.

Be financing this project himself, he went for the cheaper option.

He enlisted the help of two Baylor medical students and got to work.

But within a few months after I got back to Houston, I had my own Bobo oxygenator and we took both.

Cooley's motto was simplify, modify, apply.

He began tweaking the dwall Lilla High bubble oxygenator to make it even more cost effective.

Most notably, he swapped out its plastic tubing with easily sterilizable stainless steel, earning his machine the nickname Cooley's Coffee Pot.

The coffee Pot was a stunning success, and Cooley's caseload grew rapidly.

It wouldn't be long before it caught the attention of his ambitious and demanding boss, doctor Michael DeBakey.

In addition to running the surgical department at Baylor, DeBakey had spent the last several years jetting back and forth to Washington, d C.

To lobby for medical research funding.

I think the goal was to do what he can to make the world a better place.

Part of this he could do it in the operating room, and part of it he could do it in Washington.

That's cardiologist doctor Antonio Gatto, who worked under DeBakey at Baylor.

He knew where the hower fulcrims were that turned the engines, that he could accomplish more for medicine overall by getting more funding for research or setting up different types of research centers.

We had a lot of politicians we saw.

This was a golden age for medical research funding.

Between nineteen forty five and nineteen sixty one, the National Institutes of Health budget grew from under four million dollars to four hundred and sixty million dollars.

The more Debaky elevated his public image, the more of a say he had, and where that money went.

Cooley's daughter, doctor Louise Cooley Davis, tells a story about the day her father learned DeBakey had scheduled a VSD operation of his own using Cooley's coffee pot.

DeBakey wanted to use it in a case and hadn't asked my father, So it kind of touched my father's ego that the baker would have said, I'm going to use your oxygenator when he had been so unsupportive of it all along.

Cooley drove straight to DeBakey's house to confront him.

Despite the fact that Cooley worked for DeBakey, he didn't feel it was right for the surgical chief to confiscate his machine.

My father had developed this on his own, not paid for it all by Debaky, and had not gotten any support from Debatey, so my father said, no, you can't use my coffee pot.

It was the first real crack in the two men's relationship.

In the coming years, that crack would grow until it left its mark on the entire field of cardiac medicine.

After blocking de Bakey's attempt to use the bubble oxygenator, Cooley continued to do what he did best.

He fixed hearts.

In nineteen fifty seven alone, he performed one hundred and seven open heart operations, about three times more than Walt lilla High and John Kirkland combined.

So when Cooley stood up at a medical conference to defend Lillihigh and announce his own unprecedented success, he gave the Dwal Lillehide bubble oxygenator all the validation it needed.

Soon it was being mass produced, bringing open heart surgery to hospitals all across the world.

That was thanks in part to another of lilla High's trainees, doctor Vincent L.

Gott, who worked with Dwal to simplify the design even further.

They've developed the wall bubble auctionator into a sheet of plastic, which is the same principle, but it could be manufactured commercially, ship sterile and hung up and prime and ready to go.

And we patented that it would patten the University of Minnesota.

If heart surgery were a picnic.

Denton Cooley would later say Walt Lilla High brought the can opener.

No matter how great his achievements or how many lives he saved, Little High was haunted by the ones he couldn't and no failure was more excruciating to him than the tragedy of Geraldine Thompson.

At the US Courthouse in Minneapolis, Lila High watched from the defense table as.

The thirty three year old mother of four approached the witness stand.

She'd lost weight.

Her sister testified that in the year since the failed VSD operation that resulted in Geraldine's permanent brain damage, she'd dropped from one hundred ten pounds to just seventy nine pounds.

She couldn't walk without dragging her left foot, she'd lost most of the use of her left hand, and she struggled to answer basic questions like what were the ages of her four children.

Geraldine required around the clock care, and her husband said that the bills had exhausted their savings.

Lilahi wanted the Thompsons to be made whole, but the hospital was offering less than a tenth of the family's demands, so a settlement was out of the question.

He really did feel like Bunny doesn't solve proms, but to try to give some compensates.

That.

Yeah, he was all fourth.

That's Walt Lilahi's son, doctor Craig Lilihigh.

He really did feel like, yes, sue and win.

You deserve those moneys.

But the Thompson's lawyers struggled to win over the jury.

They were taking on a world famous doctor in his home city.

Worst of all, according to Walt Lillahigh, they didn't correctly identify the anesthesiologist who was responsible.

For the error.

Here's doctor Walt Lillahigh.

Again, he was a real.

Culprit, but he never was even named in the suit.

I don't think they ever understood what happened.

After hearing two weeks of testimony, the jury was deadlocked nine to three in favor of Lilahi's team.

The judge dismissed the case.

It was the worst possible outcome for all parties.

The Thompsons were left without a dime to cover the lifetime of medical care Geraldine would require.

The hospital's reputation was sullied by the damning front page press coverage, and lilli High would never rest easy knowing that a family that had suffered under his watch would be taken care of.

Now that his bubble oxygenator was being mass produced, Lila High hoped that tragedies like that of Geraldine Thompson were behind him, But even as he performed open heart operations at an unprecedented rate, a troubling pattern emerged.

Ten percent of the ventricular defect closures developed heartbluck, and the first seventy cases we had seven heartblucks.

All of those seven died and that was a devastating complication to us.

Heart Block is a disruption in the heart's electrical system after a VSD repair.

Lilla High found that some of patient's hearts refused to return to their normal rhythms or to beat it all.

The only options available in nineteen fifty seven were to administer a shot of adrenaline or to manually massage the heart.

Neither of them was particularly effective.

I knew nothing about it, and very if you cardiologists knew anything about it, and you just sudd their shoulders and hope for the best.

Patients were give them to death in those early days.

In the nineteen fifties, heart surgeons experienced the death of a patient on a weekly, sometimes daily basis, but that didn't make it any easier to cope with.

Here's doctor Craig Lilihaigh Again.

In those days, you know, them mortalities were astronomical, but as you were pushing the frontier, that's the baggage that you took on.

Dad didn't really share his disappointments with his kids.

He never bared his soul about how that hurt.

But I know it hurt.

Walt lilla High often didn't want or didn't know how to talk about his failures to his wife Kay.

He could be a locked fault.

For Lilla High, the only way to talk about problems was in the context of solving them.

Well, we used to have Saturday morning conferences in this hospital, but patient outcomes as you learn from your mistakes better than you learn from your accomplishments.

And one day we were discussing an incant a diet of heart block, and the physiology chief suggested, you know, we have an instrument in our laboratory called a grass physiological stimulator.

He said, one of our student sessions is stimulating the arts of frogs and saw it takes only one or two worlds.

Well, was a revelation, at least in my head.

Lillahi was familiar with the work of cardiologist Paul Zohl, who resuscitated a patient's heart by delivering high voltage electrical shocks using metal paddles and leaving terrible burns on the patient's skin.

With that in mind, Lilihigh tasked the young doctor Got with studying the low voltage grass stimulator for human use.

If Lila Hig's theory was correct, the small electrical pulses the machine put out might just make it possible to pace a patient's heart back into rhythm.

Here's an archival recording of doctor Got.

And January Naction fifty seven.

Doctor Hi Paul down to lab said, I've got a patient here in heart block.

Did you bring up the grass stimulator?

The stimulator was about the size of a small microwave, and with its many knobs and switches, it looked like something you might see in an old submarine control room.

With the patient's chest still open from surgery, Lillahigh could run the leads directly into her heart.

There were a thousand ways for this to go wrong, but as Lili High liked to say, ready.

Fire aim, Dark Little High put in the wire into mycardium and his skin and sure enough.

That patient did fine.

And just like that, the modern pacemaker was born.

Lilla High continued to use the grass stimulator to pace patients with heart block, but the machine could be cumbersome.

That'd be plugged into the one ten bullies and the patient and art block couldn't go for any time at all without stimulation, So they couldn't go down to X ray, they couldn't go to the lab unless you strung a wire.

When patients needed to be moved around the hospital, nurses would run numerous extension cords end to end down the halls.

Here's nurse a.

Bowman moving a child with the temporary pacemaker to another bed or to the sunroom to sit in the sun.

They would have a group of about ten people moving this plug down the hall space by space.

That was suggested by one of the nurses, and it became sort of a routine.

It was just this whole thought that ran this together, and we're going to find a solution to help these children.

On Halloween nineteen fifty seven, there was an explosion at the main plant of the Northern States Power Company.

It triggered a massive blackout across the the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul for two and a half hours.

The University hospital and the lives of its young patients whose hearts required constant electrical stimulation were dependent on emergency power.

Thankfully, all of those patients survived, But for Walt Lillehigh, the urgent need for a battery powered pacemaker had become clear.

In nineteen fifty seven, there was a young and ambitious electrical repair man working at the hospital by the name of Earl Bachan.

Just like Lillahih, Bachin was fascinated by the way things work as a kid.

He built a taser to fend off schoolyard bullies and a multimeter device to measure the passion of a kiss, which he called the kissometer.

Naturally, Lillehigh felt a close kinship to Bachan.

But electricians absolutely refused to come in the operation room what an operation was in progress.

They said it was not part of their contract.

Came over for every open heart operation, and he was that first and last person as far as I was concerning.

After the blackout, Lillahigh assigned Bachan the task of building the first battery powered pacemaker.

Bachan worked on the problem during his off time from the hospital, testing various designs in the garage where he and his brother in law ran their electronics repair business.

It was an unheeded rage in Minnesota.

That is quite an achievement, as you can imagine.

That's Adrian Fisher, curator of Exhibits and Collections at the Bachan Museum.

Did torres I think was a coffee can?

In the very early days, they were repairing radios and TVs just to make ends meet.

The big client for them was the Heart hospital at the University of Minnesota.

And drew his first sketch of a working pacemaker on the back of a memo from a medical device company.

His inspiration came from a popular electronics magazine article.

He remembered seeing in a magazine from fifty six a transistorized circuit sketch of a metronome.

The transistor was invented shorty before that, and so he pretty much used a circuit sketch and put it in a box.

Less than two months after getting his assignment, Bachin returned to Lila High's office with a four and a half inch square box, and Lila High wasted no time in putting it to use.

He tested the device on a dog for only a few hours before implanting it in a young patient with heart block.

The portable pacemaker was an immediate success.

Bachen began selling the device to surgeons outside of the U of M, some of whom had previously denied the existence of heart block.

Well name any names back McCall feral, oh no insurgents telling me that they've ever had hard book, seen it, and I find out that they're not only ordering that supply of pacemakers, but a number of electrodes.

The pacemaker would continue to be refined in the coming decades, becoming smaller, fully implanted, empowered by long lasting lithium batteries.

Today, more than a million pacemakers are implanted every year.

Earl Bachen and his brother in law's garage repair company kept the patent on their invention.

They called themselves Medtronic.

Metronic is now one of the largest medical device companies in the world, worth over one hundred billion dollars.

Walt Lillehigh, who'd never been very good with money, was one of their first investors.

As the nineteen fifties neared its end, Lillihigh was at the apex of his creative genius and his career.

He'd already outlived his.

Prognosis, and his no Tomorrow approach to life had paid off.

He was living and working at full tilt.

It wouldn't be long before he lost control.

On our next episode, surgeons across the country raced to transplant the human heart.

The stakes are unimaginably high, rivalries turned vicious, and the first surgeon to cross the finish line chucks the world next time on Cardiac Cowboys.

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

Were presented by Chris Pine and written and narrated by me Jamie Appley.

Our executive producers.

Are Christina ev for iHeart Podcasts, Dub Cornette and Jason Ross for OsO Studios.

Doctor Gerald Imber, author of Cardiac Cowboys, 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 Junction of Heart Surgery

Hmm.