Fun Fact Friday #6
You
will notice that today my blog has gone a bit red! That is because
today The British Heart Foundation are asking everyone to
#WearItBeatIt and join the fight against heart disease.
If
you have been reading this blog, you will know that last year I had
another open heart surgery, and it is charities like BHF that fund
the research that help change and save peoples lives. I'll be posting
more about that later today and over the coming weeks.
So
today's FunFactFriday could only be heart related;
1. Your heart beats 100,000 time per day and women's heart rate is approximately 8 beats higher then men's (78 vs 70bpm).
2. The first stethoscope was created by René Laennec in 1816, when he had listen to a patients chest. Up until then doctors would have to put their ear onto the patient's chest to listen to their heart and lungs. Laennec though this was a bit inappropriate so tried using a tube of paper, which magnified the sound of his patient's lungs, and voila! The Stethoscope was born and by the 1890's wooden tube stethoscopes had been replaced by plastic ones similar to those used today!
3. The
first pacemakers were large units that had to be plugged into mains.
In the 1950's Wilson Greatbatch, accidentally invented the
implantable pacemaker, while build a device to record heart sounds but
used the wrong resistor and ended up giving out small shocks. After
years of working on it the first implantable pacemaker was used on a
patient in 1958.
4. The
first heart transplant was performed by Doctor Chris Barnard on the
3rd December 1967 in Cape town. The operation took a team
of 30 9 hours to perform. It was 5 months later that the UK's first
heart transplant took place, it took more than 7 hours and was
performed by a team of 18, lead by Doctor Donald Ross.
5. The British Heart Foundation was founded in 1961 by a group of medical professionals who wanted to fund extra research into heart and circulatory disease. The 'Heart beat' logo was created in 1971 by one of the charities regional organisers, Sheila Harrison.
Today The British Heart Foundation are asking everyone to #WearItBeatIt and join the fight against heart disease.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/wilson-greatbatch-inventor-of-the-implantable-cardiac-pacemaker-2363206.html
http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/dr-chris-barnard-performs-worlds-first-human-heart-transplant
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/may/3/newsid_4294000/4294423.stm
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