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Benjamin Franklin invented the first flexible catheter, made of hinged metal segments for his brother John, who suffered from bladder stones. Before this catheters had been hard tubes, jammed into the bladder through the urethra.
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Dr. Crawford W. Long performed the first operation using diethyl ether as an anesthetic. He pressed an ether-soaked towel against the patient's face to put him to sleep, then removed one of two tumors from his neck. The operation including anesthesia cost $2.
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Dr. Albert S. Hyman creates a heart pacemaker, about 10 inches long and weighed less than a pound; it supplied the heart with a current with adjustable voltage. The device had been used in seven cases, although the results were good in only two of them.
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Claude Beck successfully defibrillated the heart of a 14-year-old boy during cardiac surgery, bringing an apparently dead person back to life. This was probably its first successful clinical application.
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Dr. John Heysham Gibbon used his new invention, the heart-lung bypass machine, for the first time in open-heart surgery, completely supporting a patient's heart and lung functions for about half the time of the surgery.
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In the first successful kidney transplant, after at least nine failures, a team of surgeons at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston transplanted a kidney from a 24-year-old man to his twin brother. The recipient lived 11 years more, and in 1990 the lead surgeon, Dr. Joseph E. Murray, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology.
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Dr. Edward Hon of Yale reported using a Doppler monitor on a woman's abdomen to detect fetal heartbeat, this was its first use in prenatal care.
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Dr. Christiaan Barnard, a South African, performed the first human heart transplant. The patient, a 53-year-old man, died 18 days later.
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The first draft of the human genome was announced, and three years later finished.
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Dr. Colin McGucklin and Dr. Nico Forraz of Newcastle University developed a liver grown from stem cells. The size of a small coin, it was not an organ that could be implanted in a human.
