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Ann Thorac Surg 2003;76:S2201-S2202
© 2003 The Society of Thoracic Surgeons

Supplement: Gibbon & His Heart-Lung Machine

Recollections on Dr John H. Gibbon, Jr

Anthony R. C. Dobell, MD*

Emeritus Professor of Surgery, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

* Address reprint requests to Dr Dobell, 192 Des Chanterelles, Sainte Agathe des Monts, Quebec, J8C 228 Canada.
e-mail: dobell@polyinter.com

Presented at the symposium, "Gibbon & His Heart-Lung Machine: 50 Years & Beyond," Philadelphia, PA, May 2, 2003.

The first 300 words of the full text of this article appear below.

I would like to recall for you Dr Gibbon as I knew him when I was a resident 50 years ago. He was at the height of his renown, president of the American Surgical Association and the American Association for Thoracic Surgery, close friend of the great names in surgery, and clearly already one of the legends himself. I was at the bottom, he was at the top.

I was so fortunate to be one of his residents and particularly to be assigned to the only proven heart-lung machine in the world from July 1953 to June 1954. This was after the legendary operation on May 6, 1953, and my only extremely minor role in that surgery was to baby-sit the patient on her second or third postoperative night.

Doctor Gibbon loved solving clinical problems and this was one of his teaching techniques. In the early clinical years we would attend his weekly sessions in the "pit" as it was called, a teaching performance in a sunken amphitheatre before the senior medical class. The chief resident would select two or three patients unknown to Dr Gibbon; they might be undiagnosed or postoperative or complicated. Whatever the situation he talked at length on any subject and he never hesitated to come to a conclusion and advise appropriate action. I am sure the students profited from these dramatic presentations but we residents unquestionably gained the most. This was still the time when surgeons were expected to know everything in all fields and Dr Gibbon certainly seemed to. He was a perpetual student of surgery.

He was of course a teacher and his teaching of the junior residents was more remote from that of the chief residents who worked closely with him assisting him in operations, communicating with him about his patients, and . . . [Full Text of this Article]






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