T. S. Fedotov and the Problems of Utilization of Heart-Lung Machine in the USSR (1940s – 1950s)

Abstract

This article reviews the biography of T. S. Fedotov, a Voronezh associate of a prominent physiologist S. S. Bryukhonenko. Studies on the application of autojector, the first heart-lung machine in the world created by Bryukhonenko, were carried out at the Voronezh Medical Institute jointly with the Institute of Experimental Physiology and Therapy of the Peopleʼs Commissariat for Health since mid-1930s. It was under Bryukhonenko’s supervision that Fedotov prepared his dissertation (1941) on the restoration of higher nervous activity in dogs, revived after exsanguination and clinical death. After the war, in Voronezh, Fedotov continued with his own experimental studies of the use of the autojector on laboratory animals. At the same time, he encountered the medical community’s disapproval of the idea of using the heart-lung machine (cardiopulmonary bypass) and was scientifically marginalized. Nevertheless Fedotov did not abandon his experiments with Bryukhonenko’s device and even modernized it. Using the case of Fedotov’s life and work as an example, the paper attempts to show the complicated and controversial events in Soviet science in the first decades after the Great Patriotic War. The inflated expectations for using the heart-lung machine in the pre-war 1930s and the hopes for, in the near future, being able to revive humans after the war gave way to rejection of the device as harmful and useless for practical application.