How Minnesota Doctors Invented Open-Heart Surgery in 1952
On September 2, 1952, a team of surgeons in Minneapolis stepped into uncharted territory. Facing long-standing medical taboos and a dying five-year-old patient named Jacqueline Johnson, Dr. F. John Lewis and Dr. C. Walton Lillehei attempted what many deemed impossible: operating directly inside a stopped human heart. Equipped with an ice-blanket cooling system and an ordinary livestock watering trough ordered from a Sears Roebuck catalog, the team bought themselves a strict, heart-stopping window of just a few minutes to repair a congenital defect. This is the story of the five and a half…
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