Looking Back at Some Memorable Moments from Mass General Brigham’s History of Heart Research and Cardiac Care

With more than 200 years of scientific innovation and medical firsts, Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital—the two founding members of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system—have made significant advancements to the field of heart health.

In recognition of Heart Health Month this February, we went digging through newspaper archives from the 1940s, 50s and 60s to find some examples of these advances and summarized them below.

This is just a small sampling of the work that has been done—and continues to be done—by researchers and clinicians at these hospitals to improve care for patients with cardiovascular disease.

Heart Operation Saves 18-Year-Old Patient with Potentially Deadly Valve Disorder

Featured in the Sydney World News, April 2, 1949

A heart operation at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) that saved a girl from drowning in her own blood has been described as “one of the most remarkable cases ever treated,” the Sydney World News reported at the time.

The patient, an 18-year-old girl, needed surgery because her mitral valve had narrowed after an attack of rheumatic fever. The heart functioned well enough ordinarily, but during periods of high exertion the valve was too narrow to accommodate increased blood flow. The excess blood then backed up into her lungs, threatening to drown her.

During the procedure, doctors bypassed the girl’s damaged mitral valve and joined up a segment of the pulmonary vein in the lung to the azygos vein, which runs into the right side of the heart.

The girl has had no trouble since, and this procedure has been successfully repeated on other patients at MGH, the paper reports.

Doctors Revive Woman After Heart Stops in Operating Room Drama

Featured in The New York Times, July 6, 1951

Doctors at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital—now Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH)—disclosed the details of a dramatic operating room incident that occurred in May of 1951 in which a San Francisco housewife’s heart was massaged back to life by hand after it stopped for 12 minutes during surgery.

This stunning turn of events occurred during an operation to open a blocked heart valve. Not only had the 37-year-old patient’s heart stopped for 12 minutes, but for four of those minutes it was in a state known as ventricular fibrillation, “a final dying form of quivering commonly considered fatal and from which few people have been known to be revived,” the paper reported.

The patient was in surgery because she was suffering from a narrowing of the mitral valve of the heart as a result of rheumatic fever. She was undergoing a “finger fracture” procedure developed by BWH’s Dwight Harken, MD, in which the surgeon manually fractures the mitral valve with his finger to relieve the obstruction and restore valve function.

When the patient’s heart unexpectedly stopped beating during the procedure, Harken maintained the circulation of blood through her body by massaging it with his hand.

Once heart function was restored, the woman recovered quickly and was able to move her legs and hands and answer questions within a half hour, the Times reports.

New Heart Pump Shows Promise in Reducing Heart Attack Damage

Featured in The New York Times, Oct. 4, 1961

A research team from the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, led by John Arthur Jacobey, MD, reported “encouraging” results after testing a new method for treating patients who have suffered a heart attack.

The new system—a radical departure from existing methods—proved capable of preventing much of the irreversible damage that usually follows the blockage of blood vessels in the heart, the paper reported.

The system uses a pump to put blood back into the heart’s vascular system while the heart muscle is in a relaxed state (i.e., in the space between heartbeats), which helps to reduce the damage and death of cardiac tissue due to blood loss.