William B. Kouwenhoven

William Bennett Kouwenhoven ( born January 13, 1888 in Brooklyn, New York, † November 10, 1975 in Baltimore, Maryland) was an American electrical engineer. He invented the defibrillator and made ​​important contributions to cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

Life

Kouwenhoven was educated at the Brooklyn Polytechnic with a Master 's degree in 1907 and in 1913 received his PhD at the University of Karlsruhe. It was in 1914 at Johns Hopkins University, where he was Professor of Electrical Engineering and from 1938 to 1954 dean of his department was. After retirement in 1954 he had a laboratory in the Faculty of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University and worked closely with the physicians to resuscitation techniques in cardiac arrest.

His experiments involved began in the 1930s with the neurologist Othello Langworthy in rats. In 1933 she discovered the process that could be brought by a second electric shock the heart back to beating. They encouraged surgeons to apply the technique and Claude Beck succeeded in 1947 so that a resuscitation after a cardiac arrest during surgery.

The development of a defibrillator closed-chest was performed by Kouwenhoven at Johns Hopkins in the early 1950s in collaboration with physicians ( James Jew, William Milnor, Samuel Talbot ), engineers (G. Guy Knickerbocker ) and with the support of the initially skeptical chief surgeon Alfred Blalock. The apparatus was first used in 1957 in an operation at Johns Hopkins and 1960 in a patient who suffered a cardiac arrest in the investigation. The attending physician Gottleib Friesinger brought to the apparatus ( at that time a heavy equipment on wheels) from the laboratory of the University and could revive the patient with it.

The development of the defibrillator has been funded since the 1920s by electricity companies ( Consolidated Edison of New York in the case of Johns Hopkins University), providing emergency support to workers who had received an electric shock.

Kouwenhoven also made important contributions to cardiopulmonary resuscitation ( cardio- pulmonary resuscitation, CPR ) by recognizing the effectiveness of external cardiac compressions.

He was IEEE Fellow and received the 1961 Edison Medal of the IEEE. He received the Power Life Award and the 1973 Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research. In 1969, he became the first honorary doctorate from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. In 1972 he received the AMA Scientific Achievement Award.