Published: July 22, 2008 11:35 pm            

Pioneering artificial heart device is on display at KDMC

ASHLAND — The contraption looked like something scavenged from the innards of an old washing machine.

A block of Plexiglas bolted to a frame machined from aluminum, a small electric motor, some cams and gears, a valve and an electric plug straight from the hardware section at Sears. That’s all there was.

But the doctors, nurses and other medical professionals clustered around the pedestal it was displayed on at King’s Daughters Medical Center saw the work of a pioneer.

Dr. Richard Paulus, medical director of the King’s Daughters Heart and Vascular Center, saw that too. He also saw the work of his father.

The device was a prototype of an artificial heart devised by Henry Goedjen Paulus in the 1960s for the University of Vermont Medical School. The project never went beyond the testing stage, and the prototype languished in a drawer for decades.

Believing his self-educated father deserved credit for his work, Paulus recently dug the device out and agreed to display it at the hospital.

He unveiled the exhibit in a ceremony Tuesday.

“With a little bit of work and some Armorall and Windex, he was able to put it back together and loan it,” quipped King’s Daughters president and CEO Fred Jackson.

More than an oddity of medical history, the prototype heart employs many of the principles used in modern medical devices, Jackson said.

Henry Paulus’ formal education ended after his freshman year in college, but his self-education did not, his son said. “He was a bit of a mechanical genius.”

Paulus recalled his father sketching out his ideas on a yellow legal pad and then ducking into his workshop “to build these crazy devices.”

Paulus found common ground between his father and his colleagues at King’s Daughters.

“He was a common man doing some very special things. I think of King’s Daughters as a bunch of common people doing some uncommon things,” he said.

Henry Paulus joined the Civilian Conservation Corps during the depression and later worked for Piper Aircraft as a tool and die maker, then moved to Vermont during World War II as a supervisor at Bell Aircraft.

There he started his home business as a tool and die maker. Working out of his basement, he invented, among other things, the first device to measure fluid pressure on the brain and a system to wrap foil over the top of beer bottles.

MIKE JAMES can be reached at mjames@dailyindependent.com or at (606) 326-2652.

        

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