The year was 1959. It was 5:00 a.m., still cold and dark outside. I was at the nursing station on the chest ward waiting for the new chief surgeon to arrive. I was dressed in my “whites,” the uniform of a junior surgical resident: short white coat, white shoes, white pants, white shirt and tie. We were starting “rounds” early that day, since an open-heart surgery was to be attempted. So far, the record at the hospital was not good. Five open-heart surgeries had been attempted at the Veterans Hospital in West Los Angeles, and five deaths had followed. The fields of heart and vascular surgery were in their infancy. Of course, surgeries were attempted only on the sickest hearts. Without surgery, the deaths of these patients were imminent, making the risks of undertaking open-heart surgery warranted.

The heart-lung machine had been developed to pump and oxygenate the patient’s blood outside his body, allowing a patient’s heart to be stopped. This was quite an advance! Innumerable animals had been sacrificed in laboratories all over the world in order to develop such a device. Drugs were available to paralyze the heart once the patient was “on bypass,” thus allowing the surgeon to operate on the stilled heart. Blood thinners were available to keep the blood from clotting during a procedure. At the conclusion of the operation, an electric shock was applied to the heart to stimulate it to begin to beat again on its own. Most of the people on the surgical team had their own hearts stop in that moment, waiting for the patient’s heart to resumebeating.

I trained in surgery from 1957 to 1962. Just prior to that time, the heart was considered “off limits,” an inviolate organ. In doing chest surgery, or any surgery, every move made was with a view to avoid touching the heart. It was feared that the mere touching of the heart could send it into an abnormal rhythm from which it might not recover. Over the following years, many drugs were developed to reduce this hazard and make the subsequent surgeries possible. But until that time, most surgeries that were done in the chest were operations on the lung, primarily for lung cancer. Those surgeries were long and difficult, with cures few and far between. Heart surgery was verynew.

My chief was a very young, brilliant, and talented surgeon. Hired to begin the open-heart program at the hospital, he was quite tyrannical, unfriendly, and very demanding