Introducing: Cardiac Cowboys

Listen to the series when all episodes drop Mon., Sept 29.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
People called them criminals, murders. They worked in makeshift laboratories
and home garages, rigging together old dairy pumps and beer
tubing to build medical devices which they used on human patients.
The risks they took would be unthinkable to any doctor today,
but odds are someone you know is alive because of them.

(00:24):
Welcome to the wild West of American medicine. I'm Chris
Pine and this is Cardiac Cowboys, a podcast that tells
the gripping true story behind the birth of open heart
surgery and the maverick surgeons who made it happen. For
all of human history, the heart was a sacred organ,

(00:44):
off limits to surgeons.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
Since the time of the Pocrates. The rule has been
you don't mess with the heart, because if you touch
the heart, you kill the patient.

Speaker 1 (00:53):
All that changed when the ragtag group of surgeons decided
to throw out the rule book forged in the cruise
of war commanders of the earliest mass units, they came
back ready to take on the next great fight of
their lives. The young Minnesota doctor who pioneered a life
saving procedure so outlandish it turned the medical establishment against him.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
It's the first operation in history where two people can
die in the same operation. People thought that was insane.

Speaker 1 (01:22):
Two brilliant Houston surgeons who turned from close colleagues to
fierce rivals.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
It was a personal attack. It was an all out war.

Speaker 1 (01:32):
The handsome and ambitious South African doctor who performed a
shocking surgery and overnight became the most famous man on earth.
Fame is quite a lethal drug.

Speaker 2 (01:42):
The worst drug in the world is somebody clapt answer
to you because you had.

Speaker 1 (01:46):
Some of these surgeons appeared on the cover of Time magazine,
operated on kings and advised presidents. Others ended up disgraced, penniless,
convicted of felonies. Together they ignited a revolution in medicine.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
It changed the way we live. It changed the life
expectancy of people throughout the world. I'm seventy two years old.
I should be dead. The repair that he did when
I was six years old saved me, he says. If
a man landed on the moon and nobody even told
the story, except this is more important.

Speaker 1 (02:20):
Listen to the Cardiac Cowboys podcast on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you can get your podcasts.