Signedunsigned
FunctionA forerunner of the modern heart pump, the perfusion pump maintained the circulation of fluid through disembodied organs. Physiologists could therefore keep organs functioning outside the body in order to study them in a living state or try to repair them.
Historical AttributesBetween 1912 and 1930, Alexis Carrel pioneered methods for studying living tissues outside of their parent organisms. In the 1930s, he attempted to culture whole organs, but was stymied by the lack of a germ-proof pump that would flush the organ with nutritious liquid. In 1934, he enlisted the help of Charles Lindbergh, the aviator.
In 1929 Lindbergh's sister-in-law had been diagnosed with rheumatic heart disease, a disease hard to cure because at the time there was no way mechanically to circulate oxygenated blood to a beating heart during surgery. Lindbergh took up Carrel's challenge and designed this perfusion pump in 1934. It was made by a scientific glassblower at Rockefeller University. The Carrel-Lindbergh pump was first used successfully in the spring of 1935 to cultivate the thyroid gland of a cat. Several perfusion pumps from this early period survive at Rockefeller University in addition to this example here at Harvard.
Primary SourcesC. A. Lindbergh, "An Apparatus for the Culture of Whole Organs," Journal of Experimental Medicine 62, no. 3 (1 September 1935): 409-431.
Alexis Carrel and Charles A. Lindberg, The Culture of Organs (New York: Paul B. Hoeber, 1938).
Time Magazine, 31, no. 24 (13 June 1938): cover story, 40-44.
ProvenanceGiven to CHSI on June 12, 2002 by Theodore I. Malinin, Director of the Tissue Bank, Dept. of Orthopaedics, University of Miami School of Medicine; with the support of Rockefeller University's Peter Sellers, and Robert Rothschild.
Related WorksTheodore I. Malinin, "Remembering Alexis Carrel and Charles A. Lindbergh," Texas Heart Institute Journal 23, no. 1 (1996): 28-35.