Hugh Bentall

Hugh Henry Bentall (1920 to 2012) was a British surgeon who pioneered open-heart surgery. Trained at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London, he worked as a general surgeon at the North Middlesex Hospital, where he assisted in Britain's first successful pulmonary embolectomy and the first successful surgical correction of oesophageal atresia, before specialising in thoracic surgery at the London Chest Hospital and serving in the Royal Navy, including time treating liberated prisoners of war in Singapore. From 1955 to 1985 he was Consultant Thoracic Surgeon at Hammersmith Hospital, and in 1959 his team operated before Soviet surgeons in Moscow. In 1966 he devised the operation now called the Bentall procedure, which replaces the aortic valve and ascending aorta in a single operation for patients with Marfan syndrome. He became Britain's first Professor of Cardiac Surgery in 1965.