Gibbon, John Heysham

Family

John Heysham Gibbon Jr. or commonly known as Jack was born in Philadelphia on September 29, 1903 into an intelligent and famous family. Mother - Marghorie Young (Marjorie Young Gibbon), father of Jack Gibbon Sr. (John Heysham Gibbon) professor of surgery at the College of Medicine Jefferson ^{[bio 1]} . His family is unusually interesting and, of course, played a huge role in his career. The first of the Gibbons arrived in Philadelphia from Wiltshire , England in 1684 and, according to the sister of Jack Marjorie, were prophetically called John and Margery. Jack's great-great-grandfather, John Hannum Gibbons, was born in Chester County, PA and was educated in medicine in Edinburgh , becoming the first American physician five generations before Jack's birth. His son, John Heysham Gibbon, was born in 1795. Although he received his medical education at the University of Pennsylvania, he never attended it. Instead, he became a prominent mineralogist, and in 1834 he was appointed U.S. Mint probiator in Charlotte, North Carolina. His second son, Robert, became a medical practitioner, as did Robert's two sons, Jack's father and uncle. In addition, through the grandmother of Dr. Gibbon Sr., Jack had great-great-great-great-grandfather - John Lardner, who was also a doctor in London. His nephew is still named Gibbon in his profession. Of all of them, Jack knew during his lifetime only his maternal grandfather, Samuel B. Young, one of the truly outstanding US military leaders. Samuel was born in 1840 into a family known in Pittsburgh and volunteered at the start of the Civil War. His ascent from the moment of enrollment in April 1861 from an ordinary to a brigadier general, occurred with incredible speed, for only four years. After serving in Cuba during the war with Spain, he was promoted to major general and then lieutenant general. Perhaps the most important post he held was the first president of the Military College in 1902.

Jack's father, John Gibbon Sr., was born in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1871. Upon graduation from the gymnasium, he continued his studies at the Jefferson College of Medicine, which he graduated in 1891. Throughout his life, he remained closely associated with this institution, as well as with the Pennsylvania State Hospital. Unlike his son, Jack's father did not engage in research experiments in the laboratory, but made a significant contribution to the literature on clinical surgery. He was honored to be a full member of a number of professional societies and became first secretary and then president of the American Surgical Association. In 1901, in San Francisco, he married Miss Marjorie Young, whom he met during the Spanish-American War in the Barracks of Jefferson, Missouri. She was one of the "Five Beautiful Young Sisters," the daughters of General Young and his wife Margaret McFadden Young. The young Mrs. Gibson did not have a permanent place of study, because she often moved after her father. She had a deep love of poetry and books, which she never stopped reading. It is likely that Jack inherited a love of poetry from her.

Jack and his brothers and sister grew up in a happy family in Philadelphia, spending all their time in the summer and winter near Media on the beautiful Lynfield Farm, which was inherited by Jack after the death of his parents. Jack was one and a half years younger than Marjorie, one and a half years older than Sam, and four and a half years older than Robert. He was an athletic, competitive-loving boy, occasionally showing his “explosive character”. Surpassing his brothers and friends in almost all sports, he finally overtook them in horseback riding. One of the family's favorite games was chess. The game often began before lunch and continued during lunch, and usually ended with Jack winning. He was surrounded by the love and admiration of his parents, he loved to talk for a long time with his father, whose dedication to his profession and receptivity to new ideas Jack especially appreciated. Their opinions diverged only in politics, where Jack's liberalism was especially far from his father's conservatism. Both parents died in 1956, one week after another.

Learning

Jack attended the William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia, where he was an excellent student. According to Marjorie, from the summer camp in 1919, just before entering Princeton, he returned completely changed, largely due to one of his educators, Jim Landis, who later became the first chairman of the Securities Commission and exchanges . Although he was always diligent, but now he literally burst into flames of literature and philosophy. After graduating from school, he joined Marjorie studying in the summer at the Sorbonne . There they roamed free and laid-back together, and Jack, continuing to be passionately interested in French history, spent all his time reading William James 's book, “ The Variety of Religious Experience ”. He told her that he was going to go to a medical school in Edinburgh and about living together there. But instead, in 1919 he returned to Princeton. These early years at Princeton were not completely happy, as he felt too young and immature for companionship with fellow students, barely reaching sixteen. He spent most of his time reading and studying and graduated from the university in 1923 at nineteen.

In the same year, Jack enters Jefferson College of Medicine , but by the end of his first year of study is going to leave him, thinking that doing something else, perhaps writing, will be to his taste. But his father gives him a very serious argument in favor of continuing his professional education, saying: “If you don’t want to practice medicine, then you don’t need to, but there is nothing wrong with getting the opportunity to practice it.” Following the advice of his father, he received a doctorate in medicine in 1927 .

Notes

Literature

• Harris B. Shumacker, Jr. John Heysham Gibbon, Jr. (1903–1973) = John Heysham Gibbon, jr. (1903-1973). - Washington DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1982.- 247 p.

In 1927, after graduating from medical school, John went to the Pennsylvania Hospital to undergo a two-year internship, where he actively participated in clinical trials, studying the effects of sodium chloride and potassium in the diet of patients with hypertension. After two years of internship, she is assigned the research assistant position of Dr. Edward Churchill at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston ^[1] .

In February 1930, John began working in the laboratory at Harvard Medical School, where he met his future wife, an assistant to Dr. Churchill, Mary Hopkins. ^[2]

On October 3, 1930, John and Churchill examined a patient complaining of chest discomfort, who had been in bed for 2 weeks after cholecystectomy . Suddenly, the patient lost consciousness, her breathing was disturbed. Dr. Churchill was diagnosed with pulmonary embolism . According to vital indications, the patient had to be taken to the operating room to perform the almost always fatal Trendelenburg operation, also known as pulmonary embolectomy . John Gibbon was assigned to monitor the patient's condition at night, and when her blood pressure could not be measured in the morning, the patient was immediately sent for surgery. Dr. Churchill performed an embolectomy from the pulmonary artery in 6.5 minutes, but the patient died. Jack thought for a long time about how the patient's condition could be improved, and he had the idea of ​​redirecting venous blood from the dilated veins to the apparatus, where the blood was saturated with oxygen, got rid of carbon dioxide, and then returned back to the patient's arteries.

Returning to Philadelphia in 1931 , John and his wife begin to conduct preparatory studies on the creation of an artificial circulatory system. In 1934, working at Harvard under the leadership of Dr. Churchill, they were able to achieve their first successes: cats with complete occlusion of the pulmonary artery remained alive until 2 hours 51 minutes. However, the apparatus still had unresolved problems, the most serious of which were hemolysis , which developed when blood passed through the apparatus, and the inability to oxygenate large volumes of blood. Gibbon's work on the device was interrupted in January 1942 , when he volunteered for the Second World War , where he stayed until 1945.

Gibbon returned to work on the device at Jefferson College of Medicine in 1946, where, with the help of one of his students, Clark (EJ Clark) ^[1] met with Thomas Watson Sr. (Thomas Watson) president of IBM . Clark was a medical student at Jefferson College and was assigned to work in the laboratory along with John Templeton, who was Gibbon's assistant. Clark served as a pilot at the Military Air Transport Service during the war and was engaged to the daughter of Lafayette College President, who was a close friend of Thomas Watson. Clark rightly believed that Watson might be interested in helping develop a heart-lung machine. Due to this connection, Gibbon was invited to meet with Watson, who immediately became an active supporter.

For several years, Jack personally collaborated with Thomas Watson Sr. and five other IBM engineers. As a result, they built the first cardiopulmonary bypass device, which could work stably directly during heart operations, without damaging red blood cells and without creating air bubbles ^[3] .

May 6, 1953 ^[1] John Gibbon in Philadelphia for the first time in the world performed a successful open heart surgery for an atrial septal defect using a cardiopulmonary bypass . This operation was the first of a series of five operations performed by Gibbon in 1950 . Subsequently, four of the five patients of Dr. Gibbon died due to various complications, in connection with which the author of the first heart-lung machine refused open heart surgery.

In 1955, John Kirklin and his team at the Mayo Clinic, modifying the Gibbon AIC, later used it to perform pioneering open-heart surgery.

Scientific titles

• 1923 - Bachelor, Princeton University
• 1927 - MD, Jefferson College of Medicine

Honorary titles

• 1959 - Ph.D., University of Buffalo
• 1961 - Ph.D., Princeton University
• 1965 - Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
• 1967 - Ph.D., Dickinson College
• 1969 - Doctor of Law, Jefferson College of Medicine
• 1970 - Doctor of Science, Duke University

Military ranks

• 1942 - 1944 Major, US Army
• 1945 Lt. Col., US Army

• History of Cardiac Surgery: John Gibbon (Neopr.) . FSBI Federal Center for Cardiovascular Surgery. Date of treatment February 5, 2012. Archived May 18, 2012.