Who invented the defibrillator?

Answer 1

Bernard Lown is credited with the development of the external form of the defibrillator, a device to restart the heart muscle through the application of a low voltage shock across the heart, or externally across the chest. Lown developed the device based on US cardiologist Paul Zoll's emergency procedure that used simple AC wall current.

Alois A. Langer is credited as co-inventor of the implantable defibrillator. The actual development of the implantable ICD was pioneered at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore by a team including Michel Mirowski, Morton Mower, and William Staewen.

Defibrillation was first demonstrated in 1899 by Jean Louis Prevost and Frederic Batelli, two physiologists from University of Geneva, Switzerland. They discovered that small electric shocks could induce ventricular fibrillation in dogs, and that larger charges would reverse the condition.

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Answer 2

Defibrillation was first demonstrated in 1899 by Jean Louis Prevost and Frederic Batelli, two physiologists from University of Geneva, Switzerland. They discovered that small electric shocks could induce ventricular fibrillation in dogs, and that larger charges would reverse the condition.

In 1933 a Dr Albert Hyman a heart specialist at the Beth Davis Hospital of New York City and a C. Henry Hyman, an electrical engineer, looking for an alternative to injecting powerful drugs directly into the heart, came up with an invention that used an electrical shock in place of drug injection. This invention was called the Hyman Otor where a hollow needle is used to pass an insulated wire to the heart area to deliver the electrical shock. The hollow steel needle being one end of the circuit and the insulated wire the other end. Whether the Hyman Otor was a success is unknown.

The first use on a human was in 1947 by Claude Beck, professor of surgery at Case Western Reserve University. Beck's theory was that ventricular fibrillation often occurred in hearts which were fundamentally healthy, in his terms "Hearts that are too good to die", and that there must be a way of saving them. Beck first used the technique successfully on a 14 year old boy who was being operated on for a congenital chest defect. The boy's chest was surgically opened, and manual cardiac massage was undertaken for 45 minutes until the arrival of the defibrillator. Beck used internal paddles on either side of the heart, along with procainamide, an antiarrhythmic drug, and achieved return of normal sinus rhythm.