Charles A. Hufnagel

Charles A. Hufnagel, M.D. (August 15, 1916 – May 31, 1989) was an American surgeon who in the early 1950s invented the first artificial heart valve.

Dr. Hufnagel was born in Louisville, Kentucky and was reared in Richmond, Indiana. His father was also a surgeon. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame and earned his medical degree from Harvard Medical School. At Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, he began work on the heart and other organ transplants and explored the use of plastic to replace blood vessels, developing a technique called multi-point fixation, which would have great importance in the placement of the artificial aortic valve.

In 1950, Dr. Hufnagel joined the Georgetown University faculty as director of the surgical research laboratory and professor of surgery. He became chairman of the department of surgery in 1969 and held the post until 1979.

In September 1952 Dr. Hufnagel, then director of the Georgetown University Medical Center's surgical research laboratory, implanted an aortic "assist" valve into the circulatory system of a 30-year-old woman. The valve consisted of a pea-size ball of plastic inside a chambered tube—an inch and a half long and an inch thick—that regulated blood flow through the heart. The manufactured valve compensated for the faulty original valve, but did not actually replace it, while ensuring that the heart was able to pump blood successfully into the body's circulatory system.

The purpose of the aortic valve is to prevent blood from flowing backward into the heart. In the artificial valve the free-moving plastic pea in the tube was dislodged by the pulsing blood with each heartbeat, then fell back to close the tube between pulses.

The first patient to receive the plastic implant had rheumatic fever, which had severely damaged her aortic valve to the point where she was given little chance to live. Shortly after the implant, she was able to resume a normal life and lived for almost a decade with the implanted valve before dying of unrelated causes. The valve itself, however, had some drawbacks, including the fact that it "clicked" loudly enough to be heard by others. Several hundred other patients subsequently received other "Hufnagel" valves.

Dr. Hufnagel later made significant contributions to the development of the modern heart-lung machine. The principle of the early artificial aortic valve still serves as a model for heart implants.

...
Wikipedia