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Ann Thorac Surg 2003;76:S2195-S2197
© 2003 The Society of Thoracic Surgeons
Distinguished Service Professor of Surgery, Uniformed Services University, Bethesda, Maryland, and Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Surgery, Indiana University, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA
* Address reprint requests to Dr Shumacker, 1000 Lowry St, Delray Beach, FL , USA 33483.
Presented at the symposium, "Gibbon & His Heart-Lung Machine: 50 Years & Beyond," Philadelphia, PA, May 2, 2003.
Neither Jack nor I could remember when we first met. It was sometime before World War II and our friendship grew remarkably during the war. Jack was commissioned in 1941 in the Pennsylvania Hospital's 52nd Evacuation Hospital, which began its journey to the South Pacific Theater in January. I went to the Southwest Pacific with Johns Hopkins' 118th General. Neither of us needed to be in the military; Jack was 38 when he put on his uniform, and I was 33. Each of us had a wife and children. Joining the army brought to a temporary close Jack's work designing and building a heart-lung machine with a capacity adequate for human use when it was at a most encouraging stage. After Jack had reported to the American Association of Thoracic Surgery the survival of cats after a period of total cardiopulmonary bypass, Leo Eloesser of San Francisco remarked that it reminded him of Jules Verne's seemingly impossible visions that later were accomplished.
It was a coincidence that both of us were invalided back to the States, Jack on a stretcher with a herniated disc in the spring of 1944 and I about a year earlier with a partially paralyzed leg. Both of us were able to return to duty almost immediately, he with a lift on his right shoe, I with a brace on my leg.
It was at the Mayo General Hospital in Galesburg, Illinois, that our friendship became unusually close. I was a happy fellow when Jack arrived as chief of our surgical service about a year after I came there as head of the Vascular Center. Our homes were quite near one another. I can still see his wife Maly at the piano and his children, Schatzie, Johnny, Palzie, and Maggie, standing around singing lustily. We had warm, conversation-filled cocktail hours together several times a week and we alternated driving to the hospital. Our period in Galesburg couldn't have been happier for us and for Jack and his family. My wife Myrtie and Maly knew one another, but in Galesburg they became bosom pals.
Jack was astonished when I showed him about the hospital; it was full, indeed overflowing, its thousand beds not enough and hundreds of ambulatory patients there on sick leave. Entire 84-bed wards were filled with soldiers having similar injuries. One held those with fractures of the upper extremity for example, bedded so that the ones with left arms in plaster or traction were on one side, those with fractures of the right extremity on the other, with a similar arrangement in the two lines of beds on the center aisle. And so it went. The consequences of trauma in my vascular center particularly fascinated Jack, with traumatic aneurysms filling one entire ward, arteriovenous fistulas another, injuries of a major artery another, various vasomotor difficulties still another, and so many troublesome sequelae of frost bite and trench foot that hundreds had to be put on sick leave. It was an almost incredible situation that could never be duplicated in civilian life. His own general surgical service was brisk and varied and there were a fair number of chest injuries, which was his area of particular interest.
We shared our experiences in daily conversations and more formally in weekly "grand rounds." We did all sorts of things together. One Sunday morning in a secluded area behind the hospital Jack assisted me in performing an adenoidectomy on my son Peter. We didn't trust the otolaryngologist assigned to us. Jack was intrigued with the military system of medical care and we discussed it often, especially the consultant system, the centers for specialized management, and the all-out effort made to render the best care possible in the absence of fees for the service rendered. He knew that his article "An Army Doctor Comes Home and Looks at Civilian Practice" in Harper's Magazine would annoy many of his colleagues but he thought it important to air his views. Toward the end of 1944 he was discharged and returned to Philadelphia and his work on the heart-lung machine. We kept in touch with one another as his project went forward. It took a final spurt once Mr Watson and his IBM corporation lent financial and engineering support. Finally May 6, 1953, arrived and his successful closure of an atrial septal defect brought his 20-year labor to a close. Jack then cast his work with his heart-lung machine aside, turning its future use and development over to younger hands. He told me that he had achieved his goal and would now work on a different project. The part Maly played as his coworker should never be forgotten. I was as proud of Jack as if we were brothers. Even though we were separated, he in Philadelphia and I at Yale and then Indiana, our close contact continued after I left the service in the late spring of 1946.
The visits to the Gibbons on Lynfield Farm were a special treat. We would sweep the tennis court and play. Jack put as much enthusiasm into his game as he did into his work. We swam together in the icy water of the large pool they had built. The small fig tree I brought him from Mississippi wouldn't have stood the Pennsylvania winters standing and I remember how in the autumn we bent it over carefully, pinned it to the ground, and covered it with leaves, moss, and grass. At dinner time Maly would assign each of us a little task—setting the table, helping serve the food, clearing the table, washing the dishes, drying them. I can't imagine more pleasant evenings and in the winter time we sat before a roaring fire in the large fireplace of the beautiful old stone house. Maly had a talent for making arrangements and at surgical meetings she always managed to have us at their table and usually a few others. She was at the center of everything and Jack was enormously proud of her.
Our mutual, somewhat older, friend Leo Eloesser and we often organized our affairs so we could be together at surgical meetings here and abroad. The three of us must have presented a spectacle: Jack, tall patrician-looking, Leo, small with his head bent over as if he were standing at an operating table, and I, somewhere in between. We had great times together, Jack and Maly, Leo and his companion Joyce Campbell, and Myrtie and I.
I am sure that Jack was responsible for my becoming a member of the prestigious limited membership Society of Clinical Surgery before I was 36 years old. Later he would ask me, "Harry, are we leaving out some deserving young men?" He was interested in young men and women and was anxious to help them along.
As a young adult Jack wasn't thinking of medicine as a career; he wanted to be a poet, a writer. His father, Jack told me, pushed him into it, pointing out rather sternly that he wouldn't write less well for having a medical degree. He had a way with words and wrote and spoke with forceful English. He was a master of the language and as fine an editor as The Annals of Surgery or any other journal ever had.
I remember well Jack's expressive face usually reflecting a calm confidence but at times, joy, anger, disappointment, or sadness. I am still haunted by the misery registered on it when a phone call informed him that his mother was very ill while he was serving as visiting professor at Indiana and staying in our home.
An anniversary celebration was held 10 years after Jack's landmark 1953 surgery on an 18-year-old girl. His portrait painted by Gardiner Cox was presented to Jefferson and I had the privilege of being the speaker on that occasion. I remember that Jack was most pleased with the portrait and pleased to have it hanging in the same hall where his father's portrait had been placed. I remember too that we had enjoyed a happy weekend with Gardiner at Lynfield Farm and that others from the city came for cocktails and dinner.
Jack gave up his chairmanship at Jefferson in 1962 and retired to a relaxed and happy life at Lynfield farm. He took up painting and some of his work was surprisingly good for one who had no formal training. No one could have enjoyed retirement more than he: reading, painting, and spending time with family and friends.
I recall also a free afternoon in December 1972 during the meeting of the Southern Surgical Association in Boca Raton. Maly had not been feeling well and sat on the bench while Jack and Myrtie played tennis against Louise Cooley and me. It was a hard fought game and we were perspiring as we walked back to the hotel. That evening when we arrived at the table for the annual banquet there was a message to call Jack's room. He was lying in bed in his dinner jacket, having discarded his tie and opened his shirt collar. He said he was quite alright, that he had experienced a little pain in his throat, but that it was gone, he felt fit, and was ready to go down for dinner. It was evident that he had experienced an episode of angina and I persuaded him to forsake the banquet and have dinner in his room.
The next day I suggested vigorously that he consult his physician as soon as he got home and have him arrange for a coronary arteriogram. I remember saying, "Jack, you know as well as I that you may have an area of stenosis or closure that can be dilated or by-passed." He replied, "I shall give it some thought, Harry." After I returned to Indianapolis, I followed up with phone calls and letters but to no avail. He did nothing. He continued his normal life and on February 5, 1973, he died—while playing tennis just as he would have wished—and brought to an end the life of one who had made one of the most significant contributions to medicine of the 20th century.
Eight days later a memorial service was held at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Five of us gave brief talks. This is a slightly altered version of what I said:
How can I say what Jack meant to me when he meant so much. He was an inspiration to me because of the meaningful innovative contributions he made. His developments and first successful clinical application of the heart-lung machine will remain one of the true milestones in medicine.
I think of him as a professor who used his great name and position not for personal enrichment but as an opportunity to develop his department into an effective teaching group, providing the best of patient care and maintaining an overall flavor of research, one that attracted young men from here and abroad. He recognized that research is not only important for potentially contributing new knowledge but also for providing the ideal atmosphere in which students and young surgeons might mature. The bright young surgeons of this country never had a better friend.
I think of him as a soldier who made the long journey home from the South Pacific on a stretcher uncomplaining and I treasure the days we worked together at the Mayo General Hospital.
I think of him as a sympathetic, understanding father, and as an adoring husband who always wanted Maly to occupy the center spot, proud of her early collaboration in the embryonic heart-lung project.
I think of him as a genial host. I see him surrounded by intimate and admiring friends at the cocktail hour, at sheep-dipping time, in long conversations, always warm and intimate. I think of him as a friend, the best that one could want.
I think of him as a person, with boyish face and twinkling, vibrant eyes that forever seemed to register amazement that he should be surrounded so abundantly with what was good, that he had been able to accomplish so much, that so many honors had come his way.
I think of him as a liberal, feeling person, who concerned himself deeply with causes that were just. I see him as a human, who despite the seriousness of his work, seemed to bubble over with the excitement that characterizes the young at heart.
Some men are crushed by the mantle of greatness. Some find it so heavy that they must stand tall, erect, and arrogant. Jack wore his with easy grace, with no undue pride, but with a pleasant, somewhat surprised satisfaction.
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