The surgeon who performed the nation’s first human heart implant has died.
Dr. Adrian Kantrowitz, a cardiac surgeon who also developed medical implants, died Friday in Ann Arbor of complications from heart failure, according to his wife, Jean Kantrowitz.
Kantrowitz became the second surgeon in the world, and the first in the U.S. to perform a human heart transplant on an infant who died several hours later.
He performed two more heart transplants before turning away from that field and focusing on his well-known expertise in creating mechanical medical devices.
“I’m a surgeon and surgery is what I know,” he told The Washington Post in 1977, explaining his decision to leave the field. “The problems involved in making this work on a broad basis are not surgical problems, they’re immunological problems. I do not bring any special talent to solving those problems, nor does my team.”
Dr. Kantrowitz invented and for decades continued to improve the left ventricular assist device, or LVAD, which would later lend its name to his Detroit-based research company, L-VAD Technology Inc.
The device is designed to be permanently implanted in patients with otherwise-terminal heart failure, helping their hearts circulate blood and allowing them to leave the hospital.
Among his other inventions was the intra-aortic balloon pump.
His wife Jean said “he never lost his mental alertness,” apparent in his activities as a pilot, motorcyclist and sailor.
Adrian Kantrowitz was born Oct. 4, 1918, in New York City and attended New York University and the Long Island College of Medicine, now part of the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center.
After serving in the Army Medical Corps during World War II, Kantrowitz entered the emerging field of cardiac surgery. He practiced and conducted research in the 1950s and ’60s at Brooklyn’s Maimonides Medical Center.
In 1970, Kantrowitz moved his federal funding and entire team of residents and other staff to Sinai Hospital in Detroit to better accommodate his research. Sinai Hospital later merged with another hospital and is now known as Sinai-Grace Hospital.
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Image Caption: Dr. Adrian Kantrowitz operating to implant a pacemaker in patient. (TIME LIFE/Google)
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