How to use a Defibrillator

Luigi Galvani had been using electricity to stimulate inert animal muscle as far back as the mid 1700s. Giovanni Aldini, Galvani’s nephew, built upon his uncle’s work in significant fashion, specifically by making dead animals move via jolts of electricity.

In London, 1803, Aldini was given the corpse of an executed murderer named George Foster to work on. During a public demonstration of his methods, Aldini was able to open one of the dead man’s eyes, move his facial muscles, raise one arm and even clench his fist.

As we can see, the idea that a well-placed electrical current might ‘jump start’ a human heart had been floating around in the popular imagination since at least the early 19th century. Indeed, the creature in Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’, (a story partly inspired by Aldini’s work) was brought to life by a bolt of lightning.

It wasn’t until the end of the century, however, that a breakthrough would offer defibrillation an avenue through which it could migrate from the realm of fantasy to that of reality.

Working at the University of Geneva, Jean-Louis Prevost and Frédéric Batelli formally invented the process of defibrillation in 1899. The process was used to successfully induce fibrillation in dogs. Sadly, the pair used very high voltages in their experiments, which invariably incapacitated the test animals’ hearts, killing them almost immediately. This led the procedure to be disregarded as far too dangerous for human trials.

By the dawn of the 20th century, however, cardiac arrest had taken over infection to become a leading cause of death. People were now surviving previously fatal illnesses in record numbers and subsequently living to an age where heart disease was becoming a problem for them.

As is so often the case, necessity proved the mother of invention

Perhaps the earliest known ancestor of the modern defibrillator was featured in a 1933 issue of ‘Popular Mechanics’ magazine. Designed by Albert S. Hyman, the ‘Hyman Otor’ device was proudly proclaimed as a “self starter for dead man’s heart”. Although it was never successfully used, the device was an ingenious design, which used a long needle inserted between the ribs in order to fibrillate the heart without opening the chest.

Finally, in 1947, renowned heart surgeon Claude Beck, who also pioneered CPR as well as many forms of heart surgery, successfully performed the first defibrillation. His patient was a 14-year-old boy whose heart began fluctuating after surgery. Beck used a defibrillator that had been designed and developed by inventor James Rand, a friend of his. The device featured two silver ‘paddles’ (read: spoons) that were held against the heart itself, sending 60Hz directly into the organ. The boy survived and the world was amazed.

7 years later, William Kouwenhoven and William Milnor had performed the world’s first closed-chest defibrillation (on a dog). 2 years after that, Paul Zoll had performed the first closed-chest defibrillation of a human being.

In 1966, the first patients were defibrillated while en-route to hospitals in Belfast. Finally (for our round-up, at least), former United States President Lyndon B. Johnson had his life saved by a portable defibrillator in 1972. This legitimised the device in the eyes of many people, as ‘LBJ’ was a very high profile patient.

Since then, the devices have been getting easier to use, more efficient and much more ubiquitous in our lives. Today you can see them not just in hospitals and ambulances, but also in schools, entertainment venues, airports, casinos and even private homes.