Today's artificial heart remains a stop-gap solution on the way to a heart transplant for patients suffering with severe cardiac ailments. It is nevertheless a complex affair that essentially replaces all the functions of a working heart. The surprising part is that the man who developed the first patent for an artificial heart to this day is best known as the voice of a hyperactive animated tiger.

Paul Winchell has been dead since 2005. It's possible you've never heard his name, but you've almost certainly heard him as the voice of Tigger in the Disney "Winnie the Pooh" animated cartoons. He was, however, once quite famous as the ventriloquist behind his wooden sidekicks, Jerry Mahoney and "Knucklehead" Smith, and even had his own nationally syndicated television program, "Winchell-Mahoney Time" during the mid-sixties. However, years before that, already a successful performer, he managed something probably far more enduring with only his knowledge of construction (he built his own dummies), his lifelong interest in medicine, and a pre-med bachelor's degree.

According to a 2005 post in Medgadget, after defeating famed actor and accomplished dancer Ricardo Montalban in a dance contest, Winchell met and befriended Dr. Henry Heimlich, later to receive credit for being a major lifesaver in his own right as the developer of the famed "Heimlich maneuver." Winchell started to visit the OR where Heimlich worked, and one night he watched as a physician lost a patient during heart surgery. As the story goes, Winchell wondered if a device that could temporarily do the work of the heart while the surgeon worked could improve outcomes in open heart surgery, still a new and very risky process at the time. Although Winchell's artificial heart was initially too big to be used on real patients, his work was deemed advanced enough to claim a patent in 1956.

According to Winchell, eventually a University of Utah biomedical engineer named Robert Jarvik began making serious efforts at refining his work and making the heart small enough to be workable in actual surgical settings. From Winchell's description, it sounds as if there may have been a falling out with Jarvik's colleague, Dr. Willem Kolff, and today there remains some dispute about the degree of Winchell's involvement in the heart that was eventually used. Nevertheless, the Jarvik heart, which many believe operated on the same basic principle as the Winchell heart, was placed experimentally in the heart of a volunteer named Barney Clark in 1982. It was a success and continues to save numerous lives. Later on, a joint appearance on "The Merv Griffin Show" with heart transplant pioneer Dr. Christian Barnard had a tearful result when Barnard talked about a friend who had died on the operating table and who he believed might have survived with the benefit of the Winchell/Jarvik heart.

One interesting aspect from a design point of view is that Winchell claimed during his early work on the heart that in many respects, it really was not all that different from designing a dummy. These wooden puppets, of course, have simple moving parts to operate the eyes and mouth. That, he said, gave him the basis for the moving valves and chambers of the heart. Of course, building an artificial heart that can be used indefinitely in place of an organic heart has proven to be anything but simple or easy -- if it were, we'd have been using them instead of transplants some time ago -- but we do think that someday artificial hearts will be more than stop-gap solutions. While we're certainly oversimplifying, there is something heartening to imagine that it all started with a little basic medical knowledge, design expertise, and some wooden imaginary friends.