Orvan Walter Hess (June 18, 1906 – September 6, 2002) was an American physician noted for his early use of penicillin and the development of the fetal heart monitor.
"While I was waiting for him to wake up," Dr. Hess said, "I sat and read the latest Reader's Digest, in which there was an article called 'Germ Killers From Earth', about the use of soil bacteria to kill streptococcal infection in animals."
She lived to be 90 years old, dying in 1999.Hess received the American Medical Association's Scientific Achievement Award in 1979 for his work on this case.
Hess began working on a fetal heart monitor in the 1930s as a research fellow at Yale University due to his frustration with the limitations of using a stethoscope on a subject with two heartbeats and undergoing contractions.
Through the 1960s, working with Wasil Kitvenko, the chief of the medical school's electronics laboratory, Dr. Hess continued to improve on the equipment, introducing telemetry and reducing the monitor's size.