Behind the iron curtain defibrillation pioneer: Naum Lazarevic Gurvich

Abstract

Naum Gurvič was born in 1905, in the teacher's familly, in the village of Timkovichi, nearby Minsk, the capitol of Belarus. Medical education began in 1923 at the Crimean State University. He graduated in 1928 and worked as a family doctor for 4 years in the village of Volovo, near Moscow. He was admitted to postgraduate studies at the Institute of Physiology in Moscow in 1932. There, he was mentored by the director of the Second Institute of Physiology, Professor Lina Stern, who had moved from Geneva a couple of years earlier, where she had done experiments with Prevost and Batelli, then leading scientists of cardiac electrophysiology. In 1939, Naum Gurvich published the first scientific paper in the Soviet Union in which he proposed the use of capacitor discharge for defibrillation instead of alternating current. His study was published in English in 1945. He demonstrated the advantages of DC over AC shock, even proposing biphasic waveform defibrillation at that early age. Production of the world's first pulse defibrillator with Gurvich's monophasic pulse design was launched in 1952 in the USSR. His defibrillator was clinically used in heart operations in 1952. In 1957, Gurvič published the first data on the use of a biphasic pulse in defibrillation. Serial production of defibrillators began in 1962 at the Medical Equipment Factory in Lvov. At first it was called simply "defibrillator", because there were no other similar devices at that time. Naum Gurvich lived and worked under specific circumstances behind the Iron Curtain, which is why he is insufficiently known in circles dealing with the history of medicine and defibrillation. His contribution to the advancement of the theory of fibrillation and defibrillation, as well as other numerous works in the field of cardiovascular physiology, rightfully rank him as a pioneer of defibrillation.

Keywords

• history
• defibrillation
• naum gurwich