Norm Shumway and Freddie Laker die...
Posted: Sat Feb 11, 2006 2:13 pm
Dr. Shumway was my brother in laws MENTOR, studied under him at Stanford before becoming a cardiac surgeon himself. He is in Palo Alto and a memorial service at Stanford is being organized. :-1
[QUOTE]SAN FRANCISCO - Dr. Norman Shumway, the first surgeon to perform a heart transplant operation in the United States and a leading pioneer in the field, died Friday of lung cancer at his Palo Alto home, according to a spokeswoman at Stanford University.
He was 83.
Shumway completed the first successful U.S. adult heart transplant in 1968, but is probably best known for continuing with transplant research even as most others quit during the 1970s, discouraged that most recipients died soon after their operations because of organ rejection or infections.
"He was a miracle worker," said Susan Craze, who lost three of her five children to heart disease before Shumway's team was able to save the other two in the mid-1980s. "We wouldn't have any children if it weren't for Dr. Shumway."
Shumway built a large transplant research team at Stanford University throughout the 1970s that overcame rejection problems, making Stanford one of the few hospitals willing to do heart transplants at the time.[/QUOTE]