Adrian Kantrowitz was a distinguished cardiac surgeon who helped to usher in a new era in the transplantation of human organs. In addition to performing the first heart transplant on a baby — it was also the first heart transplant done in the US — he developed devices to prolong the life of patients with heart failure.

The operation on the baby, at Maimonides Medical Centre in Brooklyn on December 6, 1967, came only three days after Christiaan Barnard’s pioneering heart transplant in South Africa, and it was only the second time that a human heart had been transplanted into another human being.

Although the baby died, from a bleeding complication, six and a half hours after the transplant, the surgery was a important breakthrough in heart transplant surgery. However, Kantrowitz had to overcome fierce objections, especially within his own hospital and from some older colleagues. One problem was the question of timing: when is it appropriate to remove the donor’s heart? Even today the clinical and legal definition of death has still not been resolved.

Another problem was the belief, still widely held at that time, that the heart, unlike other organs, had a role in determining an individual’s personality. Many believed that it was unethical to transplant hearts though they did not object to other types of transplant surgery.

“It was an exciting time for cardiac surgeons,” Kantrowitz recalled, “though we were not recognised as a sub-specialty for many years. We were tackling many practical problems in the operating room, as well as dealing with controversial questions that still resonate in society.”

Organ transplantation in children has become very successful and is an important element in the treatment of cardiac and kidney disease. However, it is limited by the shortage of suitable donor organs.

Working with Michael E. DeBakey (obituary, July 14, 2008) of Texas and others, Kantrowitz also pioneered several artifical devices to help to treat apparently terminally ill heart patients, including circulatory devices, artificial organs and medical electronics. Most notably, he invented the intra-aortic balloon pump (a device that increases blood flow to the heart muscle and decreases the heart’s workload); a left ventricular assist device (L-VAD, which acts as a bridge until a matching organ donor is available); and an implantable pacemaker. The intra-aortic balloon pump went into use in the 1980s and has saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

In all he designed and developed more than 20 devices to assist vital functions, often with the help of his wife, Jean, with whom he worked for many years. He also made pioneer surgical films taken inside the living heart, including the first film of the mitral valve opening and closing inside a beating heart in 1951.

Adrian Kantrowitz was born in 1918 in New York. His father, Bernard, a general practitioner, ran a clinic in the Bronx, and his mother, Rose, was a costume designer. In 1940 he enrolled in New York University and studied mathematics. He then attended the Long Island College of Medicine (now the State University of New York (SUNY) Downstate Medical Centre). Because of the urgent need for doctors during the war he did a crash course and was awarded his medical degree in 1943. He then served in the US Army Medical Corps as a surgeon. Demobilised with the rank of major in 1946, he decided to specialise in cardiac surgery. Between 1948 and 1955 he practised surgery at the Montefiore hospital in the Bronx. In 1955 he was appointed to a professorship at SUNY Downstate Medical Centre and he also became Director of Cardiovascular Surgery at the Maimonides hospital in Brooklyn. In 1970 he moved to Detroit, and for the rest of his career he taught at Wayne State University School of Medicine and worked as a surgeon at Sinai Hospital.

In 1983 he and his wife founded L.VAD Technology, a company designing and developing leading-edge cardiovascular devices. They were innovating up to his death — Kantrowitz recently received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration to conduct a clinical trial of a new version of a balloon-pump.

Kantrowitz’s wife, two daughters and a son survive him.

Adrian Kantrowitz, cardiac surgeon and medical inventor, was born on October 4, 1918. He died on November 14, 2008, aged 90