Charles A. Hufnagel

Charles A. Hufnagel (1916 to 1989) was an American surgeon best remembered for creating the first artificial heart valve used in a patient. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, and raised in Richmond, Indiana, he studied at the University of Notre Dame and Harvard Medical School, then worked at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, where he experimented with plastic replacements for blood vessels and developed a way of fixing them in place at several points. In 1950 he moved to Georgetown University as director of the surgical research laboratory, and in September 1952 he implanted a ball-in-tube valve in the aorta of a woman whose valve had been ruined by rheumatic fever. The device assisted rather than replaced her own valve, and she lived almost ten years more. Several hundred patients later received Hufnagel valves, and his work also fed into the heart-lung machine. He chaired Georgetown surgery from 1969 to 1979 and led a three-member panel that examined President Nixon in 1974.