Michel Mirowski
Encyclopedia
Dr. Michel Mirowski was born in Warsaw
, Poland
. He practiced medicine in Israel
before coming to Sinai Hospital
in Baltimore, Maryland. While there he collaborated with Dr. Morton Mower
and later Dr. Stephen Heilman's artificial pacemaker
company to develop the first implantable cardioverter-defibrillator
, or ICD.
. When Nazi Germany
invaded Poland in the fall of 1939, his father renamed him as Mieczysław Mirowski to try to protect him from the anti-Semitism
of the time. Later, his French wife, Anna, would call him Michel, by which he became known.
To escape the Nazis, Mirowski fled to Ukraine
, and for the next five years survived under the most appalling conditions. By 1944 he was an officer in a Polish regiment and returned to Poland where, as the war ended, he registered as a medical student at the University of Gdańsk
. “Warsaw had been completely destroyed, including its ghetto,” he remembered. “None of my family was left. I couldn’t even find our old home.” Mirowski attended medical school there for a year, but gradually came to believe, ”I had to leave Poland. I had become a Zionist. After all that had happened and that I had seen, the Jews had to have a country of their own to survive. As far as Poland was concerned, it had become a cemetery for me. I told myself that I would never return.”
, but no medical schools were operating there in the early post-war years. He returned to Europe to seek training and entered the medical school at Lyon
, France, in the fall of 1947. His French was poor, and his English almost non-existent. He listened to the lectures and demonstrations in French and studied medical texts in English as he taught himself both languages.
Graduating in 1954, Mirowski returned to Israel and to a position at the Tel Hashomer Hospital where he became first assistant to Dr. Harry Heller, the chief of medicine, an association which would eventually lead him to his great project. Having decided to practice cardiology, Mirowski studied at the Cardiological Institute in Mexico City and with Dr. Helen Taussig, the pioneering pediatric cardiologist at the Johns Hopkins Hospital
in Baltimore.
. In 1966, Professor Heller started having episodes of ventricular tachycardia (a dangerous rapid heart rhythm) and died 2 weeks later while at dinner with his family.
Mirowski wondered what could have been done to prevent his mentor’s death. He reasoned that it should be possible to implant a defibrillator in the body that would convert arrhythmias when they occurred. He consulted cardiologists who knew more about such devices. They told him that debrillators could not be miniaturized. In an era when defibrillators weighed 30 to 40 pounds, it seemed preposterous to propose reducing it to the size of a cigarette box.
Mirowski decided that only in the United States could he find the funds and technical support for the project that was becoming almost an obsession for him. Through an American colleague, Mirowski learned of a job at Sinai Hospital of Baltimore, an affiliate of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he would be director of the coronary care unit but have half of his time to work on his defibrillator. So his family, which now consisted of Anna and their three daughters - each of whom would become a doctor -returned to the United States.
For the next 12 years, Mirowski and his colleagues developed their device and miniaturized it to be implanted in patients. On February 4, 1980, the first patient received a defibrillator, installed in an operating room at the Johns Hopkins Hospital
. Since then, the device Mirowski invented, much improved and further miniaturized, has been installed in millions of patients.
, a cancer of the blood. When his medical condition became desperate, and fighting against the odds as usual, he insisted on receiving the most intensive chemotherapy
. When the disease stopped responding, his oncologist raised the possibility of a bone marrow transplantation, then in experimental development for the treatment of myeloma. A near relative as donor would be needed. Did he have a brother? This would have been Abraham, lost in the Holocaust. Mirowski died on March 26, 1990 at the age of 65 years.
Though his work had been ridiculed for many years—someone described it as a “bomb inside the body”—and he was long unable to obtain grants to support the development of the defibrillator, the last 5 years of his life brought Mirowski both recognition and acclaim. Professional societies and leaders of academic medical institutions honored him. He received invitations to write more articles and give more lectures than he could accept. So he picked and chose, accommodating his friends and those who supported him in darker times. Often with his wife or children, he traveled where he wished since now he was welcome everywhere.
When he spoke overseas, Mirowski usually lectured in English
, but he often discussed his papers during the question and answer period in the language of the country he was visiting. He spoke French
, Hebrew
, Polish
, Russian
, Spanish
and Yiddish fluently, but he never learned Italian
and refused to learn German
.
Mirowski was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame
for co-inventing with Morton Mower
the automatic implantable cardioverter defibrillator
(ICD) in the 1960s after his mentor died of a heart arrhythmia. The Patent number is 4,202,340
Warsaw
Warsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. It is located on the Vistula River, roughly from the Baltic Sea and from the Carpathian Mountains. Its population in 2010 was estimated at 1,716,855 residents with a greater metropolitan area of 2,631,902 residents, making Warsaw the 10th most...
, Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
. He practiced medicine in Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
before coming to Sinai Hospital
Sinai Hospital
LifeBridge Health is a Baltimore area corporation operating several medical institutions. These most notably include Sinai Hospital of Baltimore, Northwest Hospital , and various nursing homes and medical office complexes.-Sinai Hospital:Sinai Hospital is a Baltimore, Maryland hospital originally...
in Baltimore, Maryland. While there he collaborated with Dr. Morton Mower
Morton mower
Dr. Morton Mower is an American cardiologist and the co-inventor of the automatic implantable cardioverter defibrillator. He has served in several professional capacities at Sinai Hospital and Cardiac Pacemakers Inc. In 1996, he became the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Mower Research...
and later Dr. Stephen Heilman's artificial pacemaker
Artificial pacemaker
A pacemaker is a medical device that uses electrical impulses, delivered by electrodes contacting the heart muscles, to regulate the beating of the heart...
company to develop the first implantable cardioverter-defibrillator
Implantable cardioverter-defibrillator
An implantable cardioverter-defibrillator is a small battery-powered electrical impulse generator which is implanted in patients who are at risk of sudden cardiac death due to ventricular fibrillation and ventricular tachycardia. The device is programmed to detect cardiac arrhythmia and correct it...
, or ICD.
Early life
Mirowski was born as Mordechai Frydman on October 14, 1924, in WarsawWarsaw
Warsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. It is located on the Vistula River, roughly from the Baltic Sea and from the Carpathian Mountains. Its population in 2010 was estimated at 1,716,855 residents with a greater metropolitan area of 2,631,902 residents, making Warsaw the 10th most...
. When Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
invaded Poland in the fall of 1939, his father renamed him as Mieczysław Mirowski to try to protect him from the anti-Semitism
Anti-Semitism
Antisemitism is suspicion of, hatred toward, or discrimination against Jews for reasons connected to their Jewish heritage. According to a 2005 U.S...
of the time. Later, his French wife, Anna, would call him Michel, by which he became known.
To escape the Nazis, Mirowski fled to Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
, and for the next five years survived under the most appalling conditions. By 1944 he was an officer in a Polish regiment and returned to Poland where, as the war ended, he registered as a medical student at the University of Gdańsk
Gdansk
Gdańsk is a Polish city on the Baltic coast, at the centre of the country's fourth-largest metropolitan area.The city lies on the southern edge of Gdańsk Bay , in a conurbation with the city of Gdynia, spa town of Sopot, and suburban communities, which together form a metropolitan area called the...
. “Warsaw had been completely destroyed, including its ghetto,” he remembered. “None of my family was left. I couldn’t even find our old home.” Mirowski attended medical school there for a year, but gradually came to believe, ”I had to leave Poland. I had become a Zionist. After all that had happened and that I had seen, the Jews had to have a country of their own to survive. As far as Poland was concerned, it had become a cemetery for me. I told myself that I would never return.”
Medical training
Mirowski emigrated to PalestinePalestine
Palestine is a conventional name, among others, used to describe the geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and various adjoining lands....
, but no medical schools were operating there in the early post-war years. He returned to Europe to seek training and entered the medical school at Lyon
Lyon
Lyon , is a city in east-central France in the Rhône-Alpes region, situated between Paris and Marseille. Lyon is located at from Paris, from Marseille, from Geneva, from Turin, and from Barcelona. The residents of the city are called Lyonnais....
, France, in the fall of 1947. His French was poor, and his English almost non-existent. He listened to the lectures and demonstrations in French and studied medical texts in English as he taught himself both languages.
Graduating in 1954, Mirowski returned to Israel and to a position at the Tel Hashomer Hospital where he became first assistant to Dr. Harry Heller, the chief of medicine, an association which would eventually lead him to his great project. Having decided to practice cardiology, Mirowski studied at the Cardiological Institute in Mexico City and with Dr. Helen Taussig, the pioneering pediatric cardiologist at the Johns Hopkins Hospital
Johns Hopkins Hospital
The Johns Hopkins Hospital is the teaching hospital and biomedical research facility of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, located in Baltimore, Maryland . It was founded using money from a bequest by philanthropist Johns Hopkins...
in Baltimore.
Treating dangerous arrhythmias
For the next 5 years, Mirowski was the sole cardiologist at Asaf Harofeh Hospital, 15 miles from Tel AvivTel Aviv
Tel Aviv , officially Tel Aviv-Yafo , is the second most populous city in Israel, with a population of 404,400 on a land area of . The city is located on the Israeli Mediterranean coastline in west-central Israel. It is the largest and most populous city in the metropolitan area of Gush Dan, with...
. In 1966, Professor Heller started having episodes of ventricular tachycardia (a dangerous rapid heart rhythm) and died 2 weeks later while at dinner with his family.
Mirowski wondered what could have been done to prevent his mentor’s death. He reasoned that it should be possible to implant a defibrillator in the body that would convert arrhythmias when they occurred. He consulted cardiologists who knew more about such devices. They told him that debrillators could not be miniaturized. In an era when defibrillators weighed 30 to 40 pounds, it seemed preposterous to propose reducing it to the size of a cigarette box.
Mirowski decided that only in the United States could he find the funds and technical support for the project that was becoming almost an obsession for him. Through an American colleague, Mirowski learned of a job at Sinai Hospital of Baltimore, an affiliate of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he would be director of the coronary care unit but have half of his time to work on his defibrillator. So his family, which now consisted of Anna and their three daughters - each of whom would become a doctor -returned to the United States.
For the next 12 years, Mirowski and his colleagues developed their device and miniaturized it to be implanted in patients. On February 4, 1980, the first patient received a defibrillator, installed in an operating room at the Johns Hopkins Hospital
Johns Hopkins Hospital
The Johns Hopkins Hospital is the teaching hospital and biomedical research facility of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, located in Baltimore, Maryland . It was founded using money from a bequest by philanthropist Johns Hopkins...
. Since then, the device Mirowski invented, much improved and further miniaturized, has been installed in millions of patients.
Later life
In the mid 1980s, Mirowski developed multiple myelomaMultiple myeloma
Multiple myeloma , also known as plasma cell myeloma or Kahler's disease , is a cancer of plasma cells, a type of white blood cell normally responsible for the production of antibodies...
, a cancer of the blood. When his medical condition became desperate, and fighting against the odds as usual, he insisted on receiving the most intensive chemotherapy
Chemotherapy
Chemotherapy is the treatment of cancer with an antineoplastic drug or with a combination of such drugs into a standardized treatment regimen....
. When the disease stopped responding, his oncologist raised the possibility of a bone marrow transplantation, then in experimental development for the treatment of myeloma. A near relative as donor would be needed. Did he have a brother? This would have been Abraham, lost in the Holocaust. Mirowski died on March 26, 1990 at the age of 65 years.
Though his work had been ridiculed for many years—someone described it as a “bomb inside the body”—and he was long unable to obtain grants to support the development of the defibrillator, the last 5 years of his life brought Mirowski both recognition and acclaim. Professional societies and leaders of academic medical institutions honored him. He received invitations to write more articles and give more lectures than he could accept. So he picked and chose, accommodating his friends and those who supported him in darker times. Often with his wife or children, he traveled where he wished since now he was welcome everywhere.
When he spoke overseas, Mirowski usually lectured in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, but he often discussed his papers during the question and answer period in the language of the country he was visiting. He spoke French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, Hebrew
Hebrew language
Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
, Polish
Polish language
Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...
, Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
, Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
and Yiddish fluently, but he never learned Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
and refused to learn German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
.
Mirowski was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame
National Inventors Hall of Fame
The National Inventors Hall of Fame is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to recognizing, honoring and encouraging invention and creativity through the administration of its programs. The Hall of Fame honors the men and women responsible for the great technological advances that make human,...
for co-inventing with Morton Mower
Morton mower
Dr. Morton Mower is an American cardiologist and the co-inventor of the automatic implantable cardioverter defibrillator. He has served in several professional capacities at Sinai Hospital and Cardiac Pacemakers Inc. In 1996, he became the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Mower Research...
the automatic implantable cardioverter defibrillator
Implantable cardioverter-defibrillator
An implantable cardioverter-defibrillator is a small battery-powered electrical impulse generator which is implanted in patients who are at risk of sudden cardiac death due to ventricular fibrillation and ventricular tachycardia. The device is programmed to detect cardiac arrhythmia and correct it...
(ICD) in the 1960s after his mentor died of a heart arrhythmia. The Patent number is 4,202,340