Over the past century, heart operations that once were unthinkable have become commonplace. Thousands of times a day, surgeons graft arteries, fix structural defects or transplant entire hearts.

Dr. John Gibbon invented the heart-lung machine and used it to perform the world’s first successful open-heart surgery on May 6, 1953. Dr. John Gibbon was a researcher and surgeon at Jefferson Medical ...

The creation of heart-lung bypass was clearly "one of the major milestones of modern medicine," said Dr. James K. Kirklin, the former director of cardiothoracic surgery at the University of Alabama at ...

Advanced life support like extracorporeal membrane oxygenation takes over the functions of the heart and lungs for critically ...