This heart-lung machine was one of the earliest to be used regularly for open-heart surgery.

Heart-lung machines bypass the patient's own heart, oxygenating the blood and pumping it around the body during surgery. For the first time they made possible operations on common congenital heart problems such as a hole in the heart, which had previously caused much illness and early death.

Designed at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, this was a modification of the heart-lung machine developed by the surgeon John Gibbon. His machine had been devised over years of experimentation and was first used for a successful open-heart operation at the Jefferson Hospital, Philadelphia, in May 1953. Mayo Clinic staff, Dr. Earl Wood and Dr. John Kirklin, working with engineers from the Custom Engineering and Development Company of St Louis, Missouri, produced this more commercially viable version in 1955.

The machine shown here was used at London's Middlesex Hospital. At first surgeons had to decide whether to order an expensive American machine like this, or to have one built in the hospital workshops. Gradually, several different models were made available and a new, specialised class of paramedic, the pump technician, was introduced to run the machines.

Inv. 2000-71