"First Artificial Heart Transplant" William DeVries Hand Signed TLS Todd Mueller

Description

Up for auction the "First Artificial Heart Transplant" William DeVries Hand Signed TLS from 1991.
This item is certified authentic by Todd Mueller and comes with their Certificate of Authenticity.
ES-8527
William Castle DeVries
(born December 19, 1943) is an American
cardiothoracic
surgeon
, mainly known for the first transplant of a TAH (total
artificial heart
) using the
Jarvik-7
model.
In 1979 Doctor DeVries went back to the University of Utah to become the chairman of thoracic and cardiovascular surgery; there, he used to perform two to five open-heart operations a week At that time the university was known for being one of the country's few pioneering centers for advanced surgery on vital organs and their transplanting and implanting into animals and humans
[9]
In
Salt Lake City
he worked with doctor
Robert Jarvik
and doctor
Kolff
. By the time DeVries was back to Salt Lake City, the calves with
artificial heart
were able to live up to six, seven, even eight months. These results inspired him to take on with the work and so he started a series of long-term animal experiments. After two years of experiments, doctor DeVries and his colleagues tried to obtain the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration
(FDA) and the
National Institutes of Health
(NIH) approval. At the beginning, nobody really paid much consideration to the work, but after a while it started to acquire new attention, things changed, and even the NIH started to be interested in the project. Therefore, DeVries started to look for a suitable patient for the first attempt. In 1982, the FDA gave the approval to experiment the device on a human, and so a panel of six members at the
University of Utah Medical Center
started searching for a patient. The group was composed of two cardiologists, a
psychiatrist
, a nurse, a social worker and DeVries; the decision had to be unanimous.