Wilfred Gordon Bigelow

Wilfred Gordon Bigelow ( born June 18, 1913 in Brandon ( Manitoba ); † 27 March 2005) was a Canadian cardiac surgeon.

He was the son of the physician and surgeon Wilfred Abram Bigelow (1879-1966), the first private clinic in Canada founded in Brandon.

Bigelow studied at the University of Toronto, where in 1935, a bachelor's degree in 1938 and his MD Made degrees in medicine. This was followed from 1938 to 1941 specialist training as a surgeon ( Residency ) at Toronto General Hospital on. After military service in World War II as a surgeon in the European theater of war, he continued his education in cardiac surgery 1946-1947 Richard Bing and Alfred Blalock at Johns Hopkins University Hospital continues. He then returned to the back Toronto General Hospital (TGH ), where he began in 1947 as a surgeon.

In 1948, he was Associate Professor and later Professor of Surgery at the University of Toronto. In 1953 he became head of the third department of general surgery at TGH and 1956 until his retirement in 1977, he was Chief of Cardiac Surgery at TGH. Even after that he worked as a surgeon ( Consulting Surgeon ). He also headed since 1937, the Cardiovascular Laboratory, Banting Research Institute and was a surgeon at Sunnybrook Hospital and consulting surgeon at Women's College Hospital. At TGH 1956, he founded the Cardiovascular Investigative Unit and in 1958 he organized a hospital -wide training program for cardiac surgery in Toronto.

Bigelow was in Canada pioneered the use of pacemaker technology and is known for the introduction of hypothermia in open-heart surgery. During the 1940s and 1950s, he introduced new methods of operation in cardiac surgery and developed them further as the Vineberg operation or the commissurotomy mitral valve.

1951 developed and tested with Bigelow JC Callaghan and JA Hopps by the National Research Council of Canada, the first heart pacemaker ( as an emergency measure in cardiac arrest initially in their hypothermia experiments in operations on dogs ). Techniques of hypothermia in cardiac surgery he developed in 1947 with colleagues from the Cardiovascular Laboratory of the Banting Research Institute, which in 1953 allowed the first open heart surgery in humans. He also wrote two books on the history of medicine in retirement.

He was 1967 president of the Canadian Federation of Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgeons, in 1968/69 President of the Society for Vascular Surgery, 1970-72 President of the Canadian Cardiovascular Society, 1956 and 1971, Vice- President of the International Cardiovascular Society, and in 1974 president of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery.

In 1959 he received the Gairdner Foundation International Award, and he received numerous other awards such as 1992, the Starr Medal of the Canadian Medical Association. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Officer of the Order of Canada (1981). In 1997, he was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame. He was an honorary doctorate from the University of Hamburg ( 1990) and the University of Toronto and was Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England.

He was married to the nurse Margaret Ruth Jennings since 1941 and had four children. He was an avid hunter and fisherman and was from 1958 to 1987 chairman of the Nature Conservancy of Canada.

Writings

• Cold Hearts: The Story of Hypothermia and the Pacemaker in Heart Surgery, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1984 ( the book won the 1986 Hannah Medal of the Royal Society of Canada)
• Mysterious Heparin: The Key to Open Heart Surgery, Toronto: McGraw- Hill Ryerson, 1990