C. Walton Lillehei

Clarence Walton Lillehei, called Walt, was an American surgeon who pioneered open-heart surgery and developed many techniques, items of equipment and prostheses for cardiothoracic surgery. Born in Minneapolis in 1918, he earned his M.D. at the University of Minnesota in 1942 and a Ph.D. in surgery there in 1951. After taking part in the first successful surgical repair of the heart in 1952, he used cross-circulation, in which a donor takes over the pumping and oxygenation for the patient, to repair a ventricular septal defect in 1954, and his team performed 44 open-heart operations in the following year, of which 32 patients survived. In 1958 he was responsible for the first use of a small external battery-powered pacemaker, and he developed several prosthetic heart valve designs. He trained more than 150 cardiac surgeons from 40 nations, among them Norman Shumway and Christiaan Barnard, and won the 1955 Lasker Award.