History and Developments

Abstract

In 1882, von Ziemssen reported that an electrical impulse could activate the exposed human heart! But it was not until almost 50 years later that two doctors reported the first cardiac pacing devices. In 1928, Mark Lidwell, an anesthetist at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney supported by physicist Edgar H. Booth of the University of Sydney, developed a device that delivered an alternating current via a needle inserted into the patient’s ventricle. At the Crown Street Women’s Hospital in Sydney, Lidwell used intermittent electrical stimulation of the heart and saved the life of a newborn child suffering cardiac arrest. He reported his work to the third Congress of the Australian Medical Society in 1929.