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Perfusion pump assembly from The Culture of Organs, 1938
This photograph shows a profusion pump developed by aviator Charles Lindbergh and the Nobel Prize-winning French surgeon Alexis Carrel in the 1930s. The pump, or "glass heart," was capable of maintaining organs and tissues outside the body by providing them with a supply of oxygenated blood. By 1935, they had sustained a variety of animal organs—hearts, kidneys, ovaries, spleens—in the germ-free Pyrex glass pump, but they did not use human tissues.
Courtesy National Library of Medicine
![Tall, narrow, glass instrument with curved, cylindrical pipes and valves.](http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/frankenstein/assets/images/dg_OB10928_Lg.jpg)
Topic:
Organ TransplantCreator:
Alexis Carrel (1873–1944),
Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974)