Lidwill's external cardiac pacemaker
Marcapasos cardíaco externo de Lidwill
- Date
- 1926-1928 · confidence medium
- Place
- Crown Street Women's Hospital, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
- Credited to
- Mark Lidwill and Edgar Booth
- Field
- Life & health
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
A portable device that sent electrical impulses through a needle into the heart to restart its beat, plugged into the mains. Mark Lidwill, an anaesthetist, with the physicist Edgar Booth, used it around 1926 to resuscitate a newborn baby.
Documentation is sparse: it depends on later accounts and there is no contemporary published description. Albert Hyman in New York published his pacemaker in 1932 and coined the term 'artificial pacemaker'.
What it led to
- later external pacemakers (Hyman, 1932)
- Zoll's transcutaneous pacemakers (1952)
- implantable pacemakers from 1958