Professor Stephen Westaby FRCS (born 27 July 1948) is a British heart surgeon at John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, England. [1]
Westaby and his team performed Peter Houghton's heart operation in June 2000, implanting a Jarvik 7 artificial left ventricular assist device, a turbine pump. Peter Houghton (1938–2007) became the longest living person with an electrical heart pump in the world. [2] [3]
His memoir of his career as a heart surgeon, Open Heart: A Heart Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table, was published in 2017 by HarperCollins. [4] The book was shortlisted for the 2017 Costa Book Awards Biography Award [5] and won the 2017 BMA president's choice award. [6] A second memoir, The Knife's Edge: The Heart and Mind of a Cardiac Surgeon, was published by HarperCollins in 2019. [7]
Alexis Carrel was a French surgeon and biologist who spent most of his scientific career in the United States. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1912 for pioneering vascular suturing techniques. He invented the first perfusion pump with Charles Lindbergh opening the way to organ transplantation. Carrel was also a pioneer in tissue culture, transplantology and thoracic surgery. He is known for his leading role in implementing eugenic policies in Vichy France.
William Castle DeVries is an American cardiothoracic surgeon, mainly known for the first transplant of a TAH using the Jarvik-7 model.
An artificial heart is an artificial organ device that replaces the heart. Artificial hearts are typically used to bridge the time to complete heart transplantation surgery, but research is ongoing to develop a device that could permanently replace the heart in the case that a heart transplant is unavailable or not viable. As of December 2023, there are two commercially available full artificial heart devices; in both cases, they are for temporary use, of less than a year, for total heart failure patients awaiting a human heart to be transplanted into their bodies.
Robert Koffler Jarvik is an American scientist, researcher, and entrepreneur known for his role in developing the Jarvik-7 artificial heart.
Cardiothoracic surgery is the field of medicine involved in surgical treatment of organs inside the thoracic cavity — generally treatment of conditions of the heart, lungs, and other pleural or mediastinal structures.
Cardiac surgery, or cardiovascular surgery, is surgery on the heart or great vessels performed by cardiac surgeons. It is often used to treat complications of ischemic heart disease ; to correct congenital heart disease; or to treat valvular heart disease from various causes, including endocarditis, rheumatic heart disease, and atherosclerosis. It also includes heart transplantation.
Miranda Jane Seymour is an English literary critic, novelist and biographer of Robert Graves, Mary Shelley and Jean Rhys among others. Seymour is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She elected to resign from the Royal Society of Literature in December 2023. She was formerly married to Andrew Sinclair, and Anthony Gottleib and is now married to Ted Lynch.
Cardiogenic shock is a medical emergency resulting from inadequate blood flow to the body's organs due to the dysfunction of the heart. Signs of inadequate blood flow include low urine production, cool arms and legs, and decreased level of consciousness. People may also have a severely low blood pressure and heart rate.
Heart Research UK is a national charity organisation in the United Kingdom. They fund medical research in to the prevention, treatment and cure of heart disease, as well as community projects aimed at improving the public's heart health. Since its foundation, Heart Research UK has funded over £25 million of research into heart disease and related conditions.
Daniel Hale Williams was an American surgeon and hospital founder. An African American, he founded Provident Hospital in 1891, which was the first non-segregated hospital in the United States. Provident also had an associated nursing school for African Americans. He is known for having completed the first successful heart surgery.
Henry Clay Dalton was superintendent of the St. Louis City Hospital, Missouri, United States, from 1886 to 1892, and later a professor of abdominal and clinical surgery at Marion Sims College of Medicine. He is noted for being the first American to perform the suturing of the pericardium on record. Spanish surgeon Francisco Romero was documented with performing two successful surgeries in 1801 and French surgeon Dominique Jean Larrey was documented as successfully performing surgery on a woman's pericardium in 1810.
Your Life in Their Hands is a long-running BBC TV documentary series on the subject of surgery, examining surgical practice from the point of view of both surgeons and patients. Its first run was produced by Bill Duncalf and Mary Adams, consisted of five seasons and was presented by Dr. Charles Fletcher. An early 1970s revival was presented by Jonathan Miller, and another revival, lasting from 1979 to 1987, was presented by Robert Winston on BBC One. The series was revived again in 1991 for five editions, this time narrated by Andrew Sachs on BBC Two and again in 2004 and 2005 on BBC One with Barbara Flynn as narrator.
A ventricular assist device (VAD) is an electromechanical device that provides support for cardiac pump function, which is used either to partially or to completely replace the function of a failing heart. VADs can be used in patients with acute or chronic heart failure, which can occur due to coronary artery disease, atrial fibrillation, valvular disease, and other conditions.
Peter Houghton was the longest surviving artificial heart transplant patient in the UK.
Royal Papworth Hospital is a specialist heart and lung hospital, located on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus in Cambridgeshire, England. The Hospital is run by Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.
O. H. "Bud" Frazier is a heart surgeon and director of cardiovascular surgery research at the Texas Heart Institute (THI), best known for his work in mechanical circulatory support (MCS) of failing hearts using left ventricular assist devices (LVAD) and total artificial hearts (TAH).
Philip Alexander Poole-Wilson FRCP, FESC, FACC, FMedSci was a British academic cardiologist of international reputation who had particular interest in the management of heart failure. His research helped to identify the cellular mechanisms behind heart failure and was also important in improving treatment for patients. He was instrumental in raising the profile of heart failure as a major public health problem.
Sir Terence Alexander Hawthorne English is a South African-born British retired cardiac surgeon. He was consultant cardiothoracic surgeon at Papworth Hospital and Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, 1973–1995. After starting a career in mining engineering, English switched to medicine and went on to lead the team that performed Britain's first successful heart transplant in August 1979 at Papworth, and soon established it as one of Europe's leading heart–lung transplant programmes.
Philip Caves (1940–1978) was a Northern Irish cardiothoracic surgeon. In 1972, while at Stanford University, he pioneered the use of the bioptome and transvenous endomyocardial biopsy in the early diagnosis of heart transplant rejection. It was considered the most significant advance in antirejection therapy of the time. Awarded the British American Research Fellowship in 1971, Caves worked with pioneering cardiothoracic surgeon Norman Shumway at Stanford and became staff surgeon leading the transplant programme by 1973. A year later he went to Edinburgh as a senior lecturer in cardiac surgery, where he became particularly interested in pediatric cardiac surgery.
Jack Greene Copeland is an American cardiothoracic surgeon, who has established procedures in heart transplantation including repeat heart transplantation, the implantation of total artificial hearts (TAH) to bridge the time to heart transplant, innovations in left ventricular assist devices (LVAD) and the technique of "piggybacking" a second heart in a person, while leaving them the original.