Norman Shumway

Norman Edward Shumway ( born February 9, 1923 in Kalamazoo, Michigan; † 10 February 2006 in Palo Alto, California ) was an American cardiologist and surgeon. He was a pioneer of modern heart transplantation.

Shumway graduated from Baylor University ( Medical Education in the U.S. Army ) and Vanderbilt University, where he earned his degree ( MD) made ​​in 1949 at the University of Michigan and after military service in World War II. After he received his specialist training as a surgeon ( Residency ) at the University of Minnesota where he received his doctorate in surgery in 1956. From 1958, he taught surgery at Stanford Hospital at Stanford University in San Francisco and ( after moving the clinic ) Palo Alto. In 1965 he became head of the Department of Cardiac and Thoracic Surgery, Stanford University. In 1993, he went into retirement.

Shumway was the first physician to successfully transplanted a heart on January 6, 1968 in the U.S., about a month after the first heart transplant by Christiaan Barnard in South Africa. The patient, the fifty-four steel workers Mike Kasperak who ten years earlier had a severe virus - induced myocarditis and had been admitted with a poor prognosis in the clinic, survived only 15 days and died after a series of complications. Barnard - the guest of Shumway 's Hospital at Stanford had been - came to him only a little while ago and used techniques that had developed Shumway, who performed on dogs since 1956 experimental heart transplants. At Stanford, he worked closely with Richard Lower. Shumway also played in the U.S. a leading role in the introduction of cyclosporine and generally on the development of immunosuppressive drugs in transplantation. Shumway also conducted research on the surgical treatment of congenital heart disease, aneurysms and disease of the heart valves.

Shumway died of a lung ailment.

In 1994 he was awarded the Lister Medal. He received the first Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation. In 2001 he received the King Faisal Prize for Medicine with Thomas E. Starzl and Roy Calne.

Shumway had from a ( divorced ) marriage to Mary Lou Stuurmans four children. His daughter Sara J. Shumway was deputy director of heart and lung transplantation at the University of Minnesota. With her he gave in 1995 the book Thoracic Transplantation ( Blackwell Scientific) out.