May 6, 1953 could very well be one of the most significant dates in medical history. On this day 50 years ago, Dr John H. Gibbon, Jr, performed surgery at Philadelphia’s Jefferson Hospital on a young woman in what was the world’s first successful open heart operation using a mechanical heart-lung device on a human being. In 1953 this patient was a 17-year-old college student in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, who had a congenital heart defect: a hole the size of a half dollar in the wall between the two upper chambers of the heart. She came in for regular follow-up for years and I had the chance to meet her during those visits as a nurse/perfusionist here at Jefferson. In 1978, about 25 years after her surgery, I lost track of her but up until that time she was living a healthy life working as a secretary in Philadelphia. At about this time I remember an article in the Philadelphia Bulletin, which was the evening paper at that time, in which she was quoted as saying she always had a youthful hunch or teenager’s intuition that her surgery would be a success. She felt it would go her way with Dr Gibbon, his machine, and prayers. In 1956–1957 I attended Hood College in Frederick, Maryland. From there I came to Jefferson Medical College School of Nursing from 1957–1960. While studying I met Sylvia Shopp, the head nurse of the cardiac operating room and I spent some time working in the dog laboratory where I met Dr Gibbon. Doctor Gibbon said to me one day, “What’s a nice young girl from Friends Central [he had attended our sister school Penn Charter] doing cleaning out cages? You should study hard instead.” In fact he often called me, “Hey, Friends Central!” So I did study hard and my fascination with the machinery continued for another 30 years. After graduation from nursing school I went straight to the cardiac operating room. While working as a nurse at Jefferson I was also training with Drs Templeton and Bacharach in operating the heart-lung machine. I also learned a great deal about cardiac surgery and nursing from Sylvia. When Sylvia left to get married I became the head nurse/pumpist. From 1960–1975 I had the honor of working with Dr Gibbon and his young associate, Dr John Young Templeton, first in the operating room as a scrub/circulating nurse, then as head nurse of that operating room, and finally from 1962 on as a nurse “pumpist” as we were then called. While the work was challenging, historical, and life changing for our patients, I also remember great times on such a close team, especially Christmas parties at Dr Gibbon’s farm in Media. The first Gibbon machine was a film oxygenator using a series of vertical screens. It was made to Dr Gibbon’s specifications working with IBM. It required a large prime of whole fresh heparinized blood, which was donated from many donors (some 25 of them), mostly sleepy medical students who would line up in the hallway to donate the morning of surgery or some local donors and perhaps even the Red Cross. Those were the days when students really did have to bleed for their profession. The pump was primed and the oxygenator recirculated using the whole fresh blood. The machine was the size of a grand piano and there were hoses and lines everywhere. The water supply for the heat exchanger was behind the autoclaves in a room between operating rooms 3 and 4 in the Pavilion Building. As you can imagine people were walking and tripping over the lines and hoses constantly. By the time I first used the Gibbon machine in the 1960s, there were many changes. The screens had been replaced by mylar coated aluminum sheets and the artificial lung was tailored to the patients surface area the night before. The larger the patient, the more sheets in the lung case and then of course it was all sterilized. Most of the reservoirs including the lung case were Lexan. The tubing connectors were highly polished stainless steel with very sharp edges. Some things remained the same however, as there were still hoses everywhere. At the conclusion of bypass the machine had to be dismantled and cleaned. This process took several hours, even over night. Before a solution called Hemosol came along, each piece had to be soaked separately in plastic trays in order to avoid any harm to the highly polished surfaces that could cause blood aggregates to be delivered to the next patient. Some parts had to be first cleaned with large pipe cleaners. The lung required two men to lift it in and out of the sterilizer. The Lexan parts could not be autoclaved and had to be ethylene oxide sterilized, which was a large improvement for those times, however we didn’t have any venting for the gas at the end of sterilization. This would hardly be acceptable to OSHA today. We were not yet in the age of disposables. Others like Dr DeWall and Dr Lillihei were demonstrating that a simple bubble diffusion oxygenator could be effective for temporary cardiopulmonary byass. The first one of these that I saw clinically was the 3-L Travenol bag. It was a heavy duty plastic heat sealed helical device Presented at the symposium, “Gibbon & His Heart-Lung Machine: 50 Years & Beyond,” Philadelphia, PA, May 2, 2003.