CME INDIA Presentation by ⚜ Dr. M. Gowri Sankar, MD, Senior Assistant Professor, Dept. of General Medicine, Government Medical College and ESI Hospital, Coimbatore.
Today’s History Feature:
Dr. Morton M. Mower
(Born – January 31, 1933)
💠American Cardiologist
💠Co-Inventor of the Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator
His contributions…
🔹Morton Mower was born in Baltimore, United States. He grew up in a middle class family and his father was a shoe maker.
🔹At his young age, during summer holidays, he used to work at his uncle’s toy shop. One day his uncle got very sick. But he recovered when the family physician made frequent house visit to treat him. Mower was highly inspired by the outstanding quality of patient care provided by the family physician.
🔹As a result of this, Mower applied to study medicine and graduated from the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 1959. After his studies, he served as Captain and Chief of Medicine in the Medical Corps of the US Army for two years.
🔹Then he did his fellowship at Sinai Hospital, Baltimore, which is affiliated to Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and started his career as a cardiologist.
🔹In 1969, Dr. Mower met Dr. Michel Mirowski in Sinai hospital, who wanted to build an implantable heart defibrillator.
Story of the Birth of Automatic Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator
🔹Dr. Mirowski was born in Poland, studied medicine at Medical School of Lyon. Then he did his residentship under his mentor Prof. Harry Heller at Israel. By his guidance, Dr. Mirowski studied Cardiology under Dr. Helen Taussig.
🔹Unfortunately Dr. Mirowski lost his mentor Prof. Heller due to the more serious episodes of Ventricular tachycardia while Heller was having dinner with his family.
🔹However, Mirowski strongly believed that this death could have been prevented if the defibrillator of small size had been implanted in the body.
🔹Even though the concept was far away from realistic, he wanted to miniaturize the 14 – 18 Kg defibrillator to the size of a cigarette box.
🔹In order to enhance the funds and technical support for his project, he emigrated to US and joined at Sinai Hospital. There, he worked as the Director of the Coronary Care Unit and spent most of his time on his dream miniature defibrillator.
🔹He then collaborated with his colleague, Dr. Morton Mower, to develop the miniaturized device.
🔹After their constant effort of 12 continuous years, the first Automatic Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator (AICD) was implanted in a patient successfully on February 4, 1980, at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Thereby, the new era of fighting against the sudden arrhythmic death began.
🔹Today millions of people around the world have benefited from the lifesaving protection of the AICD and it has revolutionized the approach to malignant arrhythmias.
🔹Their spirit of innovation was recognized, so both were honoured in National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002.
🔹At present, Dr. Mower is the chairman and chief executive officer of Mower Research Associates in Baltimore, holding 26 US patents.
🔹Moreover, Dr. Morton has a great passion for art work, along with his wife Tobia who is a Philanthropist and a long time nurse. He has extensive world-class collections of paintings, drawings and sculptures which were exhibited several times in the name of “Masterworks from the Collection of Tobia and Morton Mower” for charity events.
🔹By his experience, Dr. Morton declared the most impressive words:
“If you are not happy doing what you are doing, you are doing the wrong thing.”
“You always have to investigate something”
…………………………………………………………………….
An Inquisitive Mind
The Man with a Mission
Dr. Morton M. Mower
Celebrating his birthday today💐💐🙏🏼
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