You can't do bypass surgery without a perfusionist. The story goes that a drummer with the Jimmy Dorsey Band was among the earliest perfusionists. Dick Weisel, cardiac surgeon at TGH, said that his father, an academic cardiac surgeon named Wilson Weisel in Milwaukee, used to play trumpet in the 1930s with some of the big bands of the era. He would come down from Milwaukee to Chicago to jam with them. "After they were finished on Saturday, he would bring the drummer up to Milwaukee, because the guy was good with his hands. He ran the pump, and he became a founding member of the American Academy of Perfusion. His name was Ace Adams." 1 Indeed, Ace Adams became the director in the early 1970s of the St. Luke's School of Perfusion in Milwaukee.Perfusion had an even earlier beginning in Toronto. At TGH on 10 January 1958, Bigelow, Key, and Heimbecker "performed the first successful open-heart surgery in Toronto when they closed an ASD on a twenty-five-year-old female utilizing the commercially available Travenol bubble oxygenator." 2 Daniel Stanford, a young technologistengineer, was the first perfusionist at the TGH. Bigelow disliked Stanford and dismissed him.Life in the early days of perfusion was not the simplest. Barrie Fairley, who was administering the anesthetic, recalled of one operation, "Bigelow was standing with the heart cannulated and the pump behind him primed and ready to go. When he told the technician to start, [the technician] delayed taking off the arterial line clamp and one of the latex hoses split and came apart. Blood was spraying at several litres a minute up and down Bigelow's back, then his front when he turned, shouting at the technician, 'Danny, what are you doing?' The technician coolly picked up an unsterile piece of tubing that was there by chance, stopped the pump, switched the tubing and restarted -all in a

{"container_title":"The Heartbeat of Innovation","first_page":232,"last_page":238,"publisher":"University of Toronto Press"}