It couldn’t be replaced by a simple pneumatic pump, and infection damaged his organs at the same time. to describe the heart as merely a pump is much like saying that all the cellist Yo-Yo Ma does is drag horsehair across wires,” Haberman writes. “.We must recognize that death is an ethical as well as a medical issue,” Brauer wrote.Ĭlark died of “circulatory collapse and secondary multiorgan system failure,” a hospital spokesperson told Lawrence K. Schroeder, the longest to survive after transplant, lived for 620 days. In the almost six years between Clark’s death and the article, four more men had received artificial hearts. He had convulsions, kidney failure and memory lapses before his ultimate death, adds Haberman.Īfter his death, his widow Una Loy said her husband “believed in the artificial-heart concept and wanted to make a contribution,” analyst Ralph Breauer wrote in The New York Times in 1988. In those days, suffering from the infections that made artificial organ transplant such a dicey proposition, he floated in and out of consciousness, Long writes, several times asking to be allowed to die. He lived for another 112 days, his heart powered by a dishwasher-sized air compressor that he was permanently tethered to, writes Clyde Haberman for the New York Times. On December 2, 1982, Clark became the world’s first recipient of an artificial heart. With the understanding that his long-term survival chances were almost zero, Long writes, Clark agreed to undergo the transplant in the interests of science. The plastic and metal contraption was intended to replace his failing heart and do what it could not. His last hope, such as it was: the newly FDA-approved Jarvik 7. He was so sick, in fact, that he was ineligible for a heart transplant. He was 61, a dentist from Seattle, whose congestive heart failure meant he had trouble walking from bedroom to bathroom, writes Tony Long for Wired.
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