Retired postal worker William Schroder, the next patient to receive the Jarvik-7 heart, fared better. Clark lived for 112 days afterward, but during that time he experienced convulsions, memory lapses, and kidney failure. Stenberg’s attorneys, therefore, argued that he should not have to stand trial, since he was already dead. Barney Clark, a retired dentist, received a Jarvik-7 artificial heart in 1982 in an effort to save his life. But the transplant led to a new delay, since Swedish law defined death as the moment when one’s heart stopped beating. Long suspected of being a powerful Swedish crime boss, he was never convicted of any crime, partly because his health problems delayed a trial on charges of tax evasion. Stenberg’s renewed vigor was a triumph fraught with unexpected philosophical considerations. Another recipient, Leif Stenberg, made remarkable progress with his new heart, and lived 229 days before suffering a fatal stroke. William Schroeder lived a record 620 days with one, although his quality of life was poor after he suffered serious strokes within the first three weeks. Later recipients fared somewhat better with the Jarvik 7. He never left the hospital after his transplant, and ultimately died of “circulatory collapse and secondary multi-organ system failure” triggered by an infection that was likely the result of a blood transfusion, according to his obituary in the New York Times. Following the seizures, he was often disoriented, and sometimes believed he was still a dentist in Seattle. A week after the surgery, he suffered a series of seizures his doctors blamed on an imbalance of fluids and salts. A surgeon told TIME that his color had changed, from blue to pink, after more oxygen infused his blood. The surgery was considered a success, since Clark went on to live another 112 days. The artificial heart could pump blood through the body at 40 to 120 pulses per minute, but it replaced the telltale heartbeat with a soft clicking sound followed by a whoosh. The Jarvik 7, as it was called, comprised two plastic pumps powered by compressed air, which required the patient to be hooked up at all times to a rolling console the size and weight of a refrigerator. Robert Jarvik’s pneumatically-powered heart. In 1977, after new immunosuppressant drugs dramatically increased the odds of survival, the first recipient of a heart transplant at Columbia University’s Medical Center - one of only three institutions in the country performing the surgery at the time - survived 14 months.īut Clark was 11 years too old to be a candidate for a heart transplant, according to the criteria U.S. Surgeons accomplished the first human-to-human transplant in South Africa in 1967, when a man with severe heart damage received the heart of a 25-year-old woman who had died in a car crash. Barney Clarka heart that tore like tissue paper due to years of treatment with steroidsand replaced it with the worlds first permanent artificial heart. Heart transplants were already being done to prolong lives, but in a limited, last-resort way. 2, 1982, in the darkest hours of the morning, cardiothoracic surgeon William DeVries, MD, carefully removed the ravaged heart of Dr.
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