Åke Senning
Åke Senning (14 December 1915 in Rättvik, Sweden – 21 July 2000 in Zurich, Switzerland) was a Swedish cardiac surgeon who worked at University Hospital of Zürich from 1961 until his retirement in 1985.
In 1961, he followed the call to the chair of surgery at the University of Zurich and thus succeeded Theodor Billroth, Rudolf U. Krönlein, Ferdinand Sauerbruch, and Alfred Brunner.
During his career he published 350 articles in the fields of medical technology, thoracic, cardiovascular and general surgery, kidney and heart transplantation, treatment of vertebral tumours and renal artery stenosis.
Heart-lung-machine[2][3] It was Clarence Crafoord who put him in a windowless basement room at the Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm and gave him the task of developing a heart-lung machine, which he succeeded in doing in a relatively short time.
Roll Oxygenator[4] Senning's personal contributions to the development of cardiac, vascular and thoracic surgery begin as early as 1949 with the development of a Roller Oxygenator, which was successful in animal experiments in 1951 and successfully used in the world's second operation on humans and the first in Europe in 1953.
Implantable heart pacemaker[7][8][9] Together with the electrical engineer Rune Elmqvist, Åke Senning developed the first implantable pacemaker in 1958, consisting of two externally rechargeable NiCd cells and a blocking oscillator (pulse amplitude 2.5 V, duration 2 ms, frequency 70 Hz) with two germanium transistors.
Senning was opposed to any medical patent on the grounds that valuable time would be lost and that the suffering people would only benefit from his idea much later.
Inspired by this sad case, Senning spent all night scribbling drawings on paper that only he could read.
The ingenious technical execution could have occurred to someone else, but much more important was Senning's realisation that the right ventricle could also generate systemic pressure.
Besides curing numerous children with transposition of the great vessels, this idea also paved the way for many other heart operations.
Decades later, when asked what was the most important of his inventions, he replied: Electrically induced ventricular fibrillation to prevent air embolism; that saved the most lives!
Although the typing and organ reservation possibilities as well as the internal post-treatment therapy with immunosuppression were not yet sufficiently developed, his results of the first kidney transplants hardly differed from those of today.
It is worth mentioning here that Senning's first kidney transplant series was the first to be published worldwide and that it was groundbreaking for the subsequent Largiadèr era.
Further developments[20][citation needed] Similar small and larger advances were also the development of the intra-arterial vascular coil, a precursor of intra-arterial vascular prostheses, together with Dierk Maas, the various pacemaker electrodes together with Istvan Babotai, the baby heart-lung machine together with Babotai and Marco Turina, the left diaphragm replacement with pedicled pericardial valves together with Paul Hahnloser, the technique of kidney transplantation together with Felix Largiadèr and the removal of renal artery stenoses together with Georg Mayor and Ernst Zingg.
But also Martin Rothlin, Willy Meier, Ruth Gattiker, O. Läpple, Markus Jenny and many other collaborators contributed ideas which he then put into practice.
Already in the first nine months of his tenure (1961), 108 heart operations were performed and treated post-operatively in this intensive care unit.
Surgeons, internists, paediatricians and other specialists should continue to look after their patients together with the anaesthetist, as is the case in the operating theatre.
Worldwide, the Haematological, Neonatological, Paediatric, Cardiac, Coronary, Neurosurgical, Traumatological and Burn Intensive Care Units are already self-sufficient in tertiary centres.
