"The valves and chambers were not unlike the moving eyes and dosing mouth of a puppet."
Paul Winchell
The artificial heart is a machine that pumps blood around the body and is designed to replace the natural heart when it no longer works efficiently due to conditions such as heart failure. Paul Winchell (1922-2005), a U.S. television ventriloguist, was the unlikely inventor of the artificial heart.
At a cast party, Winchell met surgeon Dr. Henry Heimlich, inventor of the Heimlich maneuver for choking. After observing Heimlich in his operating room, Winchell thought that an artificial heart could keep blood pumping in during difficult open-heart procedures. With Heimlich's advice, Winchell designed an artificial heart and built the first prototype. He filed for a patent in .1956, which he received in 1963.
Winchell donated the rights to his design to the University of-Utah, allowing Robert Jarvik and others to build an artificial heart, dubbed the Jarvik-7. Jarvik introduced an ovoid shape to fit inside the human chest, and used a more suitable polyurethane material. The Jarvik-7 had two pumps (like the ventricles), each with a disk-shaped mechanism that pushed the blood from the inlet valve to the outlet valve. Oh December 2, 1982, Dr. Willem DeVries implanted the first artificial heart into retired dentist Dr. Barney dark, who survived 112 days with the device in place.
Artificial hearts, or left ventricular assist devices as they are commonly called, are now used as a bridge to keep alive patients with heart failure until donor hearts become available. Modern devices are much smaller; they do not need to store blood because constant flow-impeller pumps are used to keep the blood permanently circulating around the body.
