Surgeon-Scientists: The Maverick Who Pioneered Open Heart Surgery

Excerpted from
King of Hearts: The True Story of the Maverick Who Pioneered Open Heart Surgery
By G. Wayne Miller

Jens Kristian Lillehei left Tysnes, a heart-shaped island in Norway, in 1885, when he was seventeen. He was from a family of poor fishermen and farmers and, like so many others, he sailed to America seeking a better life. He got barely a taste. After becoming a bricklayer, marrying, and having two sons, Jens died of tuberculosis in 1898 in Minnesota at the age of thirty. His sons were not yet in school.

Jens's widow, Paluda, was determined that her children would make something of themselves. With two dollars a day cleaning houses, she put her sons through the University of Minnesota. The younger became a doctor. The older, Clarence, became a dentist and married Elizabeth Walton, a professional piano player. Clarence was in the army when the first of their three children, all sons, was born, on October 23, 1918.

Walt was a handsome boy, with Nordic features that one day would enchant women. He enjoyed the outdoors, especially the pond near his home in Edina, a suburb of Minneapolis. He played sports and he enjoyed winning, but off the field he was an easygoing boy-and a bit of a loner. Walt liked nice clothes. He liked the neighborhood library and the Edina Country Club, to which his parents belonged.

Despite their comfortable existence, the Lilleheis instilled in their children the value of hard work; Walt was not simply a Boy Scout, but an Eagle Scout-and as soon as he was old enough, he became a caddy. The Lilleheis also stressed independence. Accompanied by their dog Jiggs, a stray that showed up on the doorstep one day, Walt and his brothers would set off on Saturday mornings for the pond, not having to return until suppertime. And before they drove, the boys were free to take the trolley into the city by themselves.

The Lilleheis believed in measured discipline; the consequence for their children's bad behavior was an examination of the issue, not the back of the hand. One day when Walt was coming home from school, a classmate jumped onto the running board of his Model T, which Walt had bought with his savings from caddying. Walt wanted the classmate to get off. When the classmate refused, Walt put the gas to the floor and tore off, fishtailing down the road-and flipped his car rounding a bend. No one was badly hurt, the car still ran-and Walt got away with a lecture from Dad.

"I didn't necessarily believe in signs that said 'don't do this' or 'don't do that,'" Lillehei said years later. "If I had a reason to do it, I usually did it."

A better clue that Lillehei was destined for something other than middle-class anonymity was his skill with his hands. Lillehei instinctively understood how things worked-and how he might make them work. As an eighth grader, Walt successfully modified a BB gun to shoot ,22-caliber bullets. As a young teen, he begged his parents for a motorcycle; they resisted. When Walt found some motorcycle parts for sale-a tangled mess in a couple of bushel baskets-his parents, thinking he'd never assemble them, let him buy them. Without benefit of a manual, Walt built the motorcycle and got it running. And when he bought his Model T, Walt slung a hoist over a tree limb, took the engine out, broke it down, and reassembled it with ease.

Although he skipped two grammar school grades, Lillehei became an average high school student who nearly flunked chemistry. He won't last six weeks in college, the chemistry teacher said to Walt's father on Walt's graduation day, in 1935. That fall, at the age of sixteen, Lillehei entered the University of Minnesota. He thought he'd become a lawyer, an engineer, or possibly a dentist, like Dad, but when he learned the requirements for medical school were the same as for dentistry, he figured: Why not? With the exception of three C's, including one for surgery, Lillehei's grades at the University of Minnesota Medical School were outstanding. He graduated tenth in a class of 103.

But Lillehei was no bookworm; he had a wry sense of humor, he loved to carouse, and, after graduating from high school without having dated a girl, he developed an eye for the ladies. He coined his own motto, which he carried throughout his life: Work hard, play hard! Consciously or not, he already was a kindred spirit to John Hunter, the renowned eighteenth-century Scottish surgeon whose biography Lillehei had savored. Hunter was a tireless experimenter who was the first to demonstrate that surgery could be more than glorified butchery-that a surgeon could also be a scientist. But Hunter was no scholarly straight arrow; as a young man, he was drawn to London's gin dens and bordellos, and his lifelong disregard for risk bordered on recklessness. In an effort to demonstrate that gonorrhea and syphilis were manifestations of the same disease, Hunter, while engaged to the woman he would marry, infected himself with a pus-laden lancet. "This was on a Friday," observed Hunter. "On the Sunday following there was a teasing itching in those parts, which lasted until the Tuesday following."

During Lillehei's college years, he and his friends spent Saturday afternoons at University of Minnesota football games. On Saturday nights, they drove out to Mitch's, an establishment on the edge of town run by a one-time bootlegger who booked Hoagy Carmichael, Jack Teagarden, and other Dixieland jazz greats. Mitch's was a bottle club: you could drink all you wanted, provided you came with your own. Walt and the boys arrived with bottles of near-beer, which they brought up to strength with grain alcohol pilfered from a medical school lab.

Many nights, the jamming continued until dawn. Lillehei's stamina was unsurpassed. With only an hour or two of sleep, he was ready to take on the day, no matter what he'd had to drink.