Morton Mower, an enterprising cardiologist who helped invent an implantable defibrillator that saved many lives by returning potentially fatal irregular heart rhythms to normal with an electric shock, died April 25 in Denver. He was 89.
His son, Mark, said the cause was cancer.
dr. Mower and Dr. Michel Mirowski, a colleague at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, began work in 1969 on a device that would be small enough to be implanted under the skin of the abdomen and quickly correct the heart’s rhythm if it becomes dangerous. wrong.
dr. Mirowski had the idea to miniaturize a defibrillator; dr. Mower, who had taught himself electrical engineering in his basement workshop, believed it could be done.
“We were the crazy ones who wanted to put a time bomb in people’s chests,” said Dr. Mower in an interview with the medical journal The Lancet at the time, noting that two million people around the world use the implantable device.
The doctors quickly developed a prototype and in 1972 formed a partnership with Medrad, a medical device manufacturer. But the development of an implantable defibrillator had its critics.
dr. Bernard Lown, who invented the first effective external defibrillator, and Dr. Paul Axelrod, writing in Circulation, a journal of the American Heart Association, and Dr. Paul Axelrod said patients with ventricular fibrillation were better helped by surgery or an antiarrhythmia program.
“In fact,” they said, “the implanted defibrillator system is an imperfect solution in search of a plausible and practical application.”
The work continued. After being tested on animals, the battery-operated device, about the size of a deck of cards, was first implanted in humans at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1980. Five years later, it was approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
At the time, the FDA said the implantable defibrillator could save 10,000 to 20,000 lives a year by allowing people to quickly correct their arrhythmias instead of waiting to reach hospital emergency rooms, where external defibrillators are used with their paddles.
dr. Donald M. Lloyd-Jones, president of the American Heart Association, said in a telephone interview that 300,000 devices are implanted annually, now as small as a silver dollar.
“Having people walking around with a defibrillator, instead of being in a hospital under constant care, was really revolutionary in saving the lives of people at risk of fatal heart attacks,” said Dr. Lloyd Jones.
He added that another advantage of the device — formally known as the automatic implantable cardioverter defibrillator — was that the electric shock is delivered directly to the heart. The shock from the external defibrillator must travel from its paddles through skin and tissue before it reaches the heart.
dr. Mower and Dr. Mirowski were inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002, along with Alois Langer, a project engineer at Medrad, and M. Stephen Heilman, the company’s founder.
Morton Maimon Mower was born on January 31, 1933 in Baltimore and grew up in Frederick, about 50 miles to the west. His father, Robert, was a shoemaker, and his mother, Pauline (Maimon) Mower, was a homemaker.
As a child, Morton worked summers for his uncle Sam, who owned bathhouses and a toy store in Atlantic City. When his uncle became ill, Morton was impressed with the way the family treated the doctor during his home visits.
“They made him sit down; they let him have a cup of tea,” Dr. Mower in an interview with the alumni magazine of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where he graduated in 1959. ‘I thought, Gosh, that’s okay. That’s what I would like to do.”
After earning a bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1955, where he attended the pre-med program, and graduating from medical school, Dr. Mower an internship at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
He became the chief resident of Sinai Hospital in 1962 and then served in the Army Medical Corps in Bremerhaven, Germany from 1963 to 1965, where he was chief of medicine.
In 1966, he began a six-year stint as a researcher in Sinai’s coronary drug project. He eventually became an attending physician and chief of cardiology at the hospital. In 2005, a building on campus was named after him.
dr. Mower became wealthy by licensing the defibrillator technology and used his money to build a large art collection that included works by Rembrandt, Picasso, and Impressionist masters.
After leaving Sinai in 1989, he worked for two defibrillator manufacturers: Cardiac Pacemakers, a subsidiary of Eli Lilly, as vice president, and Guidant, as a consultant. He later taught medicine at Johns Hopkins and most recently at the University of Colorado Aurora Medical School.
dr. Mower recently formed a company, Rocky Mountain Biphasic, to find commercial uses for his many patents in areas such as cardiology, wound healing, diabetes and Covid-19.
In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Toby (Kurland) Mower, a registered nurse; a daughter, Robin Mower; three grandsons; a brother, Bernard; and a sister, Susan Burke. He lived in Denver.
The work of Dr. Mower to reset the heart rhythms did not end with the implantable defibrillator.
“I realized this was an incomplete therapy,” he told The Lancet, referring to the defibrillator. “It prevented right ventricular afibrillation, but it did nothing to support left ventricular function. People were still dying of congestive heart failure.”
He and Dr. Mirowski went on to invent cardiac resynchronization therapy, or CRT, which uses an implantable device much like a pacemaker to send electrical impulses to the heart’s right and left ventricles to force them to contract in a more efficient, organized manner. cartridge.
“CRT was as big an advancement as implantable defibrillators,” said Dr. Mower, adding that when he started testing the treatment on patients in the Netherlands, “it was almost unbelievable how the patients would come out of heart failure.”
