Heedless to say, the artificial heart is not the right term for said device. Its just a simpler way of saying Ventricular Assist Devices. Or pumps that function like the heart but can't actually replace it. They are used to assist the heart. Perhaps during surgery or when a patient is waiting for someone to die so they can to have a heart that actually works. They can be internal, TAH, or external, CPB-which is a device to take over the function of the heart and the lungs for surgery or just for a few hours.
A fully functional artificial heart is considered to be the Holy Grail of medicine. One built that could support a human's life forever, or at least a long time is what they want. Why? I don't exactly know, as far as I'm concerned humans should just accept that we can't live forever. Not only that, but seriously people, when you finally reach 900 years of age, you're just gonna be 40 lb. of wrinkles. And who wants to be like that.
It all begins with the first inventors,William Sewell and William Glenn, in 1947. These two men were doctors of the Yale School of Medicine. They created the ancestor of the modern artificial pump and used it to by pass the heart of a dog for more than an hour! :O
On December 12, 1957, Dr. Willem Kolff, the uber-artificial organs inventor, put an artificial heart into a dog at the Cleveland Clinic. Said dog lived for 90 minutes. Which makes me wonder, was it surgery? or just an unwanted pet-store dog? If it wasn't surgery than I would say that the dog definatly would have lived longer with-out the heart.
Moving on with the flow of time, in 1958, Domingo Liotta started some serious studies on TAH-total artificial heart, stupid acronyms, for about a year at the National University of Cordoba, Argentina. He showed off his skillz at the meeting of the American Society for Artificial Internal Organs, which is held in Atlantic City, in March 1961. Dr. Liotta had a lot of stuff to say too. He described three types of orthotopic, inside the pericardial sac, TAHs in dogs. Again with the dogs! *ahem* Each heart had a different external energy source. An implantable electric motor, an implantable rotating pump with an external electric motor, and a pneumatic pump.
All fired up like JFk, the National Institutes of Health dreamed up the goal of putting a man-made heart into a human by the end of the decade.
And in 1967, Dr. Kolff answered the call.
In 1973, a calf survived with an early Kolff heart. In 1975, a bull survived 90 days on an artificial heart. In 1976, a calf survived 184 days on the Jarvik 5 heart. And in 1981, a calf, named Alfred Lord Tennyson, wfh right?, lived for 268 days on a Jarvik 5.
-This Dr. Kolff, the prince of hearts.
All hearts are named after their creator, and the awesome Jarvik hearts were created Robert Jarvik. In 1981, a Dr. William DeVries asked for permission to put the Jarvik 7 into a human being. And on December 2, 1982, Dr. Kollf implanted the Jarvik 7 into Dr. Barney Clark, who was hours from death prior to Jarvik. He lived for 112 days with the man-made heart.
It has had many successes over the years, many new hearts and pumps have been created. Obviously, if the artificial heart did not exist, people wouldn't survive some particular surgeries and even more would die waiting for someone else to die first. The most recent and perhaps the most popular is the AbioCor. It is fully implantable, so no wires or what-not will penetrate the skin. And the batteries are made so that they can connect to their charger through the skin. (Who would think such a thing would cause cancer? Everything else does.)
BTW-back on the acronyms thing, did you know that BUNDY is a medical term for annoying patients that means But Unfortunately Not Dead Yet. :{
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