What “first” means here
The phrase “first artificial heart” is used in several ways. A device was used temporarily in a human in 1969 as a bridge to a donor heart, and animal experiments go back to the 1950s. Those earlier steps are described in the history of the prosthetic heart. What most people mean by the first artificial heart is the total artificial heart intended as a permanent replacement and first implanted in a patient in December 1982. That device was the Jarvik-7.
The Utah program
The Jarvik-7 came out of a research program at the University of Utah led by Willem Kolff, a Dutch physician who had built an early artificial kidney in the 1940s. Robert Jarvik, a young researcher and engineer on the team, led the design of a series of air-driven hearts, of which the seventh model reached human use. It had two polyurethane pumping chambers that replaced the lower chambers of the natural heart. Tubes passed through the chest wall to a large external console that supplied compressed air. The device, in other words, was not self-contained: the patient had to stay connected to a machine. Its valves were mechanical designs of the kind developed for artificial heart valves, and the dependence on a console is why power was a bigger problem here than the pacemaker batteries that were already running small implants for years.
Credit for the work is shared. Kolff organized the program, Jarvik shaped the design and surgeons such as William DeVries carried out the operation. Other groups were working on similar ideas at the same time.
Barney Clark
On December 2, 1982, DeVries implanted a Jarvik-7 in Barney Clark, a retired dentist in his sixties with severe heart failure who was not a candidate for a transplant. The operation was approved by the university’s review board and the US Food and Drug Administration as an experiment. Clark lived 112 days. He died in March 1983 after a period of complications that included bleeding, infection, kidney problems and breakdowns of the device, and his time with the heart included periods of lucidity and long periods of hardship.
The case drew enormous public attention. Journalists reported on his condition daily, and the story shaped how many people first heard of artificial organs.
Bill Schroeder and Louisville
The next implants took place in Louisville, Kentucky, under Humana, a private hospital company. In November 1984, William Schroeder received a Jarvik-7 and lived about 620 days, longer than Clark, though he suffered strokes and other complications. A few more patients received the device in the mid-1980s, and some were used as a bridge to transplant. Outcomes were mixed. Some people gained time; many had serious complications. In those years, strokes from clotting, infection at the points where tubes left the body, and mechanical problems were common.
The ethical debate
The Jarvik-7 was one of the first widely public debates about experimental medical technology. Several questions were raised then and are still discussed.
- Consent: Could a gravely ill patient give fully informed consent to something so new, when no one could say what would happen? Clark’s consent form was unusually detailed, and later accounts note that he asked for the device to be switched off if his suffering became too great.
- Quality of life: Is a longer life worthwhile if it is spent tied to a console and affected by complications? Different people answered differently.
- Publicity and commerce: Daily media coverage and the involvement of a for-profit hospital chain raised concerns that attention and money influenced decisions.
- Fairness: Artificial hearts were very expensive, and critics asked who would receive them and who would pay.
These issues led to more careful review of experimental devices, though the details of regulation changed over the years.
What happened to the design
The original Jarvik-7 was eventually withdrawn from clinical use in its permanent role. Its descendants, however, found a narrower job as a bridge for patients awaiting a donor heart. A version of the air-driven design, later known by other names, was approved in the United States in the early 2000s for that purpose. Separate development produced fully implanted systems at the start of the 2000s, with internal batteries and energy transfer through the skin, using electric motors and electronics built on silicon chips, but these also had limited use and mixed results. Infection at the tube sites in the 1980s cases showed how much even a successful operation depended on antiseptic surgery and careful follow-up.
The broader lesson is that the artificial heart did not become a routine replacement. Assist devices that support one ventricle, along with transplantation, took over most of the field because they were simpler and more adaptable. The lessons from this period, including stroke prevention, better materials and the need for compact power, are often credited with shaping those later devices.
A note on sources
Accounts differ in small details such as ages and exact dates of later events, and some popular accounts blur the 1969 bridge case with the 1982 implant. This article covers history only and is not medical advice.