Sixty-eight years ago today, a Swedish engineer received the first implanted pacemaker. It failed after three hours. He lived another forty-three years.

The operation nobody had permission for

Arne Larsson was 43 and dying. A viral infection had damaged his heart's conduction system and he was fainting up to thirty times a day — each one a cardiac arrest his wife resuscitated him from.

Else Larsson had read about experimental work by a surgeon, Åke Senning, and an engineer, Rune Elmqvist. She went to the hospital and refused to leave until they agreed to try.

Elmqvist assembled the device in his kitchen, using a shoe-polish tin as the mould for the epoxy casing.

It failed after three hours. A second was implanted the next day and lasted a week.

What followed

Larsson received twenty-six pacemakers over the rest of his life as the technology improved around him — each one a snapshot of where engineering had reached.

He died in 2001, aged 86, of something unrelated to his heart. He outlived Elmqvist, who built the first device. He outlived Senning, who implanted it.

What it changed

Before it, a failure of the heart's electrical system was simply fatal — an otherwise healthy person, dying because a signal stopped arriving.

Afterwards it became a maintenance problem. Millions now live with a small device doing a job their body stopped doing, and almost none of them think about it. That is the highest form of technological success: to become boring.

Pacemaker Invention is card #248 in the Legacy Domination collection — a trading card game where every card is a real moment in history. [Explore the collection →]

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Pacemaker Invention

#248

CommonMedicine & HealthBuilder

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