Being the museum we are, many people ask us about "the first pacemaker". It's a hard question, because there's a lot of history, and pre-history, to the pacemaker. Beginning in the eighteenth century, physicians realized that electrical stimulation could cause muscles to contract - and they knew perfectly well that the heart was a muscle. Charles Kite, in An Essay Upon the Recovery of the Apparently Dead (London, 1788) recommended electrical discharges to the chest for resuscitation. This was more of a precursor to defibrillation, than to pacing.

The Re-Animation Chair of Doctor deSanctis, discussed in Richard Reece's Medical Guide (London, 1820) was used to send pulses of electricity through the heart. It included a voltaic pile, an esophageal electrode, and an electrode applied to the chest over the heart. Reading the discussion of the Chair, it sounds like manually-timed pacing.

There were other trials of electricity for cardiac stimulation during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Dr. Albert Hyman invented, and patented, a "Pacemaker" in the thirties, which was used chiefly for emergency resuscitation in the operating room.

In the modern era of pacing, there are three devices that have strong claim to the title of "first". Leaving out precursors, false starts, and devices that left no descendants, we have:

Paul Zoll, MD, studied pacing in animals and in humans, and developed a combined electrocardiograph (to monitor the heartbeat) and pulsed stimulator (to cause heartbeats when they were not occurring naturally). This was manufactured by Electrodyne as the PM-65, and presented to the medical community in a 1955 article in the New England Journal of Medicine. This machine used line power, and was about the size of a large microwave oven. It was intended chiefly for emergency life-support related to cardiac surgery.

Dr. C. Walton Lillehei was pioneering open-heart surgery at the University of Minnesota, and found the PM-65 invaluable in maintaining patients whose hearts did not start beating again after surgery. The pacemaker would keep the heart beating until it healed enough to operate once more on its own. (This was usually a week or two.) When a power failure cause the line-powered PM-65 maintaining one of his patients to fail, Dr. Lillehei asked Earl Bakken to "make something that runs on batteries". Bakken delivered a prototype late in 1957, which was first used on patients in 1958; this prototype gave rise to the 5800-series of Medtronic pacemakers.

Dr. Åke Senning created the first implantable pacemaker actually used on a human, and implanted it in October of 1958. Since then, there's been a lot of detail work - but these are the three pacemakers that led to everything that has followed.

Museum Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 10 to 5
Thursdays 10 am to  8pm 
Closed Major Holidays
Library Hours: Monday - Friday 9 to 4:30

Admission: $7 Adults; $5 Students & Seniors; Children 3 and under are FREE!

© The Bakken Updated: April 6, 2007