Dwight Harken

Dwight Emary Harken (1910 to 1993) was an American surgeon and an innovator in heart surgery. Born in Osceola, Iowa, he took his bachelor's and medical degrees at Harvard and later won a fellowship to study in London. As a US Army Medical Corps surgeon in London during the Second World War he learned to remove shrapnel from a beating heart by cutting the heart wall and using a finger to find the fragment, and he is credited with operating on 134 soldiers without a death. In 1948 he applied the same approach to widen a narrowed mitral valve, a closed heart technique whose early results were poor but improved with refinement. He opened an early intensive care unit in 1951, developed an early heart assist device in the 1960s, implanted artificial aortic and mitral valves, and was chief of thoracic surgery at Harvard for 22 years.