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(Circulation. 2004;109:2928-2929.)
© 2004 American Heart Association, Inc.

In Memoriam

John W. Kirklin, MD

1917–2004

Denton A. Cooley, MD

From the Department of Cardiovascular Surgery, Texas Heart Institute, Houston, Tex.

Correspondence to Denton A Cooley, MD, Department of Cardiovascular Surgery, Texas Heart Institute, MC 3-258, PO Box 20345, Houston, TX 77225-0345. E-mail spalmer@heart.thi.tmc.edu

An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract.

It is my privilege to be asked to write a memorial for John W. Kirklin, MD, whose innovations in cardiopulmonary bypass strongly influenced the development of the field of cardiac surgery. Dr Kirklin was 86 years old when he died on April 21, 2004, from a head injury he sustained in January.

Born in Muncie, Indiana, Dr Kirklin received his undergraduate education at the University of Minnesota and earned his medical degree from Harvard Medical School. After interning at the University Hospital of Pennsylvania and the Mayo Clinic, he trained in neurosurgery at O’Reilly General Hospital in Missouri and went on to serve 2 years as an army neurosurgeon. After his discharge from the army in 1946, Dr Kirklin worked as assistant resident to renowned pediatric surgeon Dr Robert Gross at Boston Children’s Hospital. It was there that Dr Kirklin’s interests shifted from neurosurgery to congenital heart disease, which became his lifelong field of expertise.

In 1950, Dr Kirklin joined the Mayo Clinic’s Department of Surgery, of which he later became chairman. It was during his early years there that Dr Kirklin made what was to become his most widely recognized contribution to the practice of cardiac surgery—improving the design of the heart-lung machine that had been developed by Dr John Gibbon of Jefferson Medical College in collaboration with the International Business Machine Corporation. Dr Gibbon had had very limited success with the machine and eventually abandoned it, and some surgeons believed at the time that cross-circulation (connecting a patient’s . . . [Full Text of this Article]