Claude Beck

Beck studied medicine at Johns Hopkins University with a MD degree in 1921. Originally he specialized in neurosurgery. He was trained at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston and at the Lakeside Hospital in Cleveland and was 1923/24, with Harvey Cushing at Harvard University. From 1924 he was at the clinic at Case Western Reserve University, where he was in surgery from 1924 Surgical Resident and Crile Research Fellow. There he turned to cardiac surgery and in 1928 Associate Surgeon and soon Demonstrator in Surgery, 1940 Professor of Neurosurgery and 1952, the first professor of cardiac surgery ( Cardiovascular Surgery ) in the USA. He remained at the University until his retirement in 1965. He died in 1971 of a stroke.

From 1942 to 1945 he was a surgical consultant to the U.S. Army and was awarded the Legion of Merit. He developed different techniques of cardiac surgery, for example, the techniques known as Beck I and II in coronary heart disease, which he developed in 1935 and the late 1940s. In the 1920s he assisted Elliott Cutler in the first successful mitral valve operations. He was also a pioneer in the surgery of coronary arteries (1935 ) and the first successful removal of a tumor on the heart.

In 1947, he turned first to a successful defibrillation in cardiac surgery. The operation on a 14 - year-old boy with a congenital heart disease was almost over when a cardiac arrest began. First, Beck tried heart massage open heart for 45 minutes before he used a defibrillator, which he had developed with James Rand, inspired by observations of the physiologist at Case Western, Carl J. Wiggers. The measure at surgery was a complete success. He taught in the result, numerous doctors and medical staff in the art and in the emerging in the 1950s defibrillators for external use only. Three symptoms of acute cardiac tamponade are named after him ( Beck's triad).

He was married to Ellen Manning since 1928 and had three daughters.