Gibbon Develops the Heart-Lung Machine.

In the first half of the twentieth century, cardiovascular medicine had many triumphs. Effective anesthesia, antiseptic conditions, and antibiotics made surgery of all kinds safer; blood typing, anticlotting agents, and blood preservatives made blood transfusion practical; cardiac catheterization (feeding a tube into the heart), electrocardiography (noninvasive measurement of the electrical changes in the heart caused by its beating), and fluoroscopy (visualizing living tissues with an X-ray machine) made the nonsurgical diagnosis of cardiovascular problems possible. These advances were put to use solving problems of disease, injury, and birth defects in blood vessels and around the heart.