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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 years old.
His son, Mark, said the cause was cancer.
Dr. mowing and Dr. Michel MirowskiA colleague of mine at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore began work in 1969 on a device small enough to be implanted under the skin of the abdomen and small enough to quickly restore a heart’s rhythms when it went dangerously wrong.
Dr. Mirowski had the idea to shrink a defibrillator; Having taught himself electrical engineering in his basement workshop, Dr. Mower believed it could be done.
“We were crazy guys who wanted to put a time bomb in people’s chests” Dr. Mower said in an interview with the medical journal The Lancet in 2015:He noted that two million people worldwide have received the implantable device.
Doctors quickly developed a prototype and formed a partnership with medical equipment manufacturer Medrad in 1972. But the development of an implantable defibrillator has had its critics.
Circulation in Circulation, a journal of the American Heart Association, Dr. Bernard LownInventor of the first effective external defibrillator, Dr. Paul Axelrod said patients with ventricular fibrillation are better served with surgery or an anti-arrhythmia program.
“In fact,” they said, “the implanted defibrillator system represents a flawed solution in the search for a viable and practical application.”
Work continued. After testing on animals, the battery-powered device, about the size of a deck of cards, was first implanted in humans at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1980. It was approved by the Food and Drug Administration five years later.
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 departments where external defibrillators are used with their paddles.
Donald M. Lloyd-JonesThe president of the American Heart Association said in a phone interview that 300,000 devices, currently as small as a silver dollar, are implanted each year.
Dr. “Letting people walk around with a defibrillator instead of being under constant care in a hospital was truly revolutionary in saving the lives of people at risk of fatal heart attacks,” Lloyd-Jones said.
He added that another advantage of the device, officially known as an automatic implantable cardioverter defibrillator, is that the electric shock is delivered directly to the heart. The external defibrillator’s jolt must travel through the skin and tissue of the paddles before reaching the heart.
Dr. Mower and Dr. Mirowski was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame along with Alois Langer, a project engineer at Medrad, and M. Stephen Heilman, the company’s founder, in 2002.
Morton Maimon Mower was born on January 31, 1933, in Baltimore and grew up in Frederick, about 80 miles west. His father, Robert, was a cobbler, and his mother, Pauline (Maimon) Mower, was a housewife.
In his youth, Morton worked during the summers for Uncle Sam, who owned baths and a toy store in Atlantic City. When his uncle fell ill, Morton was impressed by how the family treated the doctor during the house searches.
“They made him sit down; they made him drink a cup of tea” Dr. Mower told the University of Maryland School of Medicine’s alumni journal: He graduated in an interview in 1959. “Gee, I thought this isn’t bad. This is what I want to do.”
After graduating from medical school and receiving his BS in 1955 from Johns Hopkins University, where he held a pre-doctoral program, Dr. Mower interned at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
He became chief assistant at Sinai Hospital in 1962 and later served with the Army Medical Corps in Bremerhaven, Germany, where he was chief of medicine from 1963 to 1965.
In 1966 he embarked on a six-year stint as a researcher on Sina’s coronary drug project. He eventually became a physician and chief of cardiology at the hospital. In 2005, a building on its campus was named after him.
Dr. Mower got rich by licensing defibrillator technology and used his money to build an extensive art collection that includes 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 medical school in Aurora.
Dr. Mower recently founded a company called 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 Mowing; three grandchildren; a brother, Bernard; and a sister, Susan Burke. He lived in Denver.
Dr. Mower’s job of resetting the heart’s rhythms didn’t end with the implantable defibrillator.
“I realized that this was incomplete therapy,” he told The Lancet, referring to the defibrillator. “It prevented right ventricular afibrillation, but did nothing to support left ventricular function. People were still dying of congestive heart failure.”
He and Dr. Mirowski continued to invent. cardiac resynchronization therapyor CRT, which uses an implantable device much like a pacemaker to send electrical impulses to the right and left ventricles of the heart, forcing them to contract in a more efficient, organized pattern.
Dr. “CRT was as great an advance as implantable defibrillators,” Mower said, and when he started testing the treatment on patients in the Netherlands, “it was almost unbelievable how patients would come out of heart failure.”
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