Dr. Dwight Harken

HARKEN, HOOD, HALL

Posted By: Karen Brewer (email)
Date: 10/28/2010 at 22:49:47

The New York Times
By BRUCE LAMBERT
Published: August 29, 1993

Dwight Harken, 83, the Pioneer of Surgery on the Heart, Is Dead

Dwight E. Harken, the father of heart surgery and the creator of intensive care units for critically ill patients, died on Friday at a hospital in Cambridge, Mass. He was 83 and lived in Cambridge.

The cause was pneumonia, his family said.

By removing bullets and shrapnel from the hearts of some 130 wounded soldiers in World War II without a single fatality, Dr. Harken became the world's first surgeon who had repeated success in operating on hearts.

In so doing, he shattered the medical myth of the heart as a organ so complex and vital that it was sacrosanct from surgical intervention. Before, only a handful of heart operations, usually in trauma cases like attempts to repair stab wounds, were performed.

"We discovered that the heart wasn't such a mysterious and untouchable thing after all," he said later.

Dr. Harken went on to pioneer in the technology and surgical procedures for treating malfunctioning hearts.

For most of his career was at Harvard Medical School and its Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, where he was chief of thoracic surgery from 1948-70. He held a parallel post at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge. Firsts in Heart Care

In the 1960's he developed and implanted the first device to assist the heart's pumping and the first internal pacemaker. He also was among the first to implant artificial mitral and aortic valves.

Dr. Harken's concept of intensive care arose from his concern for the survival of patients during the critical hours after surgery. In 1951 he opened the world's first intensive care unit in 1951 at Brigham.

His approach proved to be an important innovation in medicine, extending beyond cardiac cases to the care of all patients in life-threatening conditions. Intensive care significantly improved survival rates and has been adopted worldwide.

Intensive care provides extra staffing and equipment to monitor pulse, breathing, blood pressure and other vital functions, and swift intervention to aid the patient when functions, and swift intervention to aid the patient when difficulties arise.

Dr. Harken's son, Alden H., himself a cardiac surgeon, said, "Now we take intensive care units for granted, but before, they wheeled you back from the operating room to the ward without any special attention, and came back the next morning to see if you were still alive." Patients' Emotions

In another advance in medical care, Dr. Harken turned from the biological side to address the emotional concerns of patients. He gathered four of his cardiac patients to form a support group, to ease stress and promote recovery.

That effort grew into the Mended Hearts, an international organization with tens of thousands of members.

In preventive public health, Dr. Harken was an early critic of tobacco smoking as a cause of lung cancer. He was a co-founder of Action on Smoking and Health, a leader in the crusade against smoking.

As an medical educator, he helped found Heart House, a center for information on heart disease and treatments, in Washington. It is now the headquarters of the American College of Cardiology, of which he was a former president.

He also helped found the American Board of Thoracic Surgery and was a past president of the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation. He wrote or edited more than 200 scientific articles and several books and served on the boards of eight journals.

Dr. Harken was born in Osceola, Iowa. He earned his bachlor's and medical degrees at Harvard. After training at Bellevue Hospital in New York, he won a New York Academy of Medicine fellowship in London. There he specialized in chest care and began devising surgical approaches to treat heart infections.

During the war he served with the United States Army medical corps in London, where he made his cardiac surgery breakthrough. After the war he taught at Tufts University two years, then went to Harvard, where he stayed for 22 years.

Surviving are his wife of 59 years, the former Anne Hood; his son Alden, of Denver; a daughter, Anne Harken Hall, a health educator in Washington, and six grandchildren.