William B. Kouwenhoven Engineer, who is the Father of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation!

I was really intrigued when I read in Braunwald’s textbook of Heart Disease that it was William Kouwenhoven, an engineer in Baltimore who described closed chest cardiac massage! Though external cardiac massage was known in the late 19th century, it was William Kouwenhoven and colleagues who rediscovered it and popularized it. He has also invented the closed chest cardiac defibrillator. Being the dean at Johns Hopkins University, his research focused on improving and saving lives through the application of electricity.

He developed the closed chest defibrillator with the help of colleagues at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. For his contributions to the field of medical science, he was the first ever recipient of an honorary degree conferred by the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He also received the Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research. This history reminded me of Godfrey Hounsfield who co-invented Computed Tomography and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1979. All of us reading CT reports will be familiar with Hounsfield units!