1903-1973

American Surgeon

Inventor of the heart-lung machine, John H. Gibbon, Jr., first demonstrated that life can be maintained by an external pump acting as an artificial heart during an operation on a cat in 1935. Eighteen years later, in 1953, Gibbon performed the first successful open-heart operation using a heart-lung machine.

Born in Philadelphia on September 29, 1903, Gibbon was the second of four children born to John Heysham Gibbon (a surgeon) and Marjorie Young Gibbon. He earned his B.A. from Princeton University in 1923, and his M.D. from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia in 1927. He completed his internship at Pennsylvania Hospital in 1929, and in 1930 went to Harvard Medical School as a research fellow in surgery.

In 1931 Gibbon married Mary Hopkinson, a surgical researcher, and took a position as fellow in medicine at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. In the same year...