Blood and guts: a history of surgery. Part 2, Bleeding hearts.

The second in a 5-part series in which Michael Mosley traces the evolution of surgery as it progressed, in his words, from butchery to brilliance. This part features heart surgery and begins with cutting edge heart surgery performed by Stephen Westaby which involves draining all the blood out of Sophie Clark's body and stopping her heart. In between footage of this operation, Mosley travels back through time to recount the history of heart surgery. To experience how difficult heart surgery is, Mosley attempts to extract a bullet from a pig heart. Pioneering heart surgeon Dwight Harken's work is covered, including archival footage of one of his earliest attempts to remove shrapnell from a heart; he was to go on to achieve the first consistently successful heart operations. Bill Bigelow discovered that hyperthermia might play a vital role in successful heart surgery; his first open heart surgery is shown in archival film and described by Mosley, followed by the work of Lillehei. John Gibbon spent 18 years obsessively building an artificial heart and lung machine and performed his first operation using it in 1953 - Victor F. Greco remembers using it and recounts a dramatic operating room scenario in which the machine began to fail. Early heart transplantation surgery is covered and initial public reactions of horror recounted. We return to Sophie Clark's operation and follow the dramatic procedure to the end. The programme provides a watchable and detailed account of the history of cardiac surgery.