Swan, Henry

U.S. heart surgeon Henry Swan II was born on May 27, 1913 in Denver, Colorado, the son of railroad executive Henry Sr. and Carla Denison Swan. Dr. Swan made significant contributions to the development of open heart surgery techniques, particularly through his research in hypothermia and suspended circulation.

After graduating in 1931 from the Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, Swan attended Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts and completed one of the institution's first combined English-History majors. He graduated magna cum laude in 1935, the valedictorian of his class. Intent of extending the line of Denison family doctors to five generations, Swan next enrolled at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts as a member of the class of 1939, a group distinguished for producing nineteen full professors. Once again he was valedictorian of his class. Swan spent a brief period at Colorado General Hospital in Denver as a Pathology Resident before returning to Boston in 1940 to intern at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital until 1942, at which point he became a Surgical Resident at Boston's Children's Hospital.

In 1943, Swan joined the Army of the United States for two years and nine months, serving with the 4th and 5th Auxiliary Surgical Group in the European Theater. He operated on more than 1,600 wounded soldiers during World War II. It was during his military service that he learned to pilot airplanes, an interest he would continue to pursue for both work and pleasure. Swan acquired his own plane after the war and became well-known in the medical community for flying his team across the United States and as far as South America to demonstrate his surgical techniques. He survived three plane crashes over the course of his lifetime.

Swan returned to Colorado in 1946 and took an assistant professorship at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. He quickly emerged as the key figure in reinvigorating the surgical program, becoming the first full-time chairman of the Department of Surgery in 1950 and holding that position (and a full professorship) for the next eleven years. As department chair, Swan was responsible for hiring many world-class surgeons, performing hundreds of surgeries (including the first successful closure of an atrial septal defect in 1953), and setting up one of the country's first artery banks. He also established an animal research facility known as the Halsted Laboratory to study ways of correcting congenital heart problems. Here he performed supercooling experiments and practice surgeries on more than 400 dogs before developing the pioneering technique of placing a patient in a bathtub full of ice water until the body cooled to ten degrees below normal. This cooling process slowed the patient's metabolism and blood flow until the heart stopped, allowing a surgeon six minutes to operate on the heart before oxygen deprivation caused irreparable brain damage. Swan became the world's first surgeon to perform a successful series of open heart surgeries; the bathtub in which Swan chilled his patients is now part of the Smithsonian Institution's collection. Elements of his hypothermia research continue in use even though the development of the heart-lung machine provides a safer method of performing open heart surgeries.

Hypothermia was not the sole focus of Swan's research in suspended circulation. For many years he also studied bears, hummingbirds, frogs, and lungfish in an attempt to identify and isolate the chemical agent allowing them to temporarily block their metabolism during hibernation. This long term animal research facilitated Swan's development of a doctoral program in surgery at the Colorado State University School of Veterinary Medicine. He taught and continued his research at that institution from 1963 until his retirement in 1982. His book Thermoregulation and Bioenergetics, published in 1974, explained his findings regarding the chemistry of hibernation.

Swan married his first wife, Mary Fletcher Wardwell, in 1937; they had three daughters and one son before their divorce in 1964. He married his second wife, Geraldine Morris Fairchild, that same year. On July 13, 1996, Henry Swan II died of progressive motor neuropathy at age 83.

From the guide to the Henry Swan II Papers, 1935-1996, (History of Medicine Division. National Library of Medicine)