Baltimore (AP) – Dr. Morton Muer, a former Maryland cardiologist who helped invent an automatic implantable defibrillator that helped many heart patients live longer and healthier, has died at age 89.
The funeral was held Wednesday for Per Mower, who died of cancer two days earlier at Porter Adventist Hospital in Denver, The Baltimore Sun reported. A Maryland native moved to Colorado about ten years ago.
Moer and Dr. Michelle Mirowski, both colleagues at Baltimore Sinai Hospital, began work in 1969 to develop a miniature defibrillator that could be implanted in a patient. The device corrects the patient’s excessive speed or poor heartbeat with electrical shock to restore its regular rhythm.
“The whole hospital is talking about these two lunatics being put on an automated defibrillator,” Mauer said in a 2015 interview with the medical journal The Lancet. “If something goes wrong, we can never live with it. “We’re these two lunatics who want to, so to speak, drop time bombs on people’s chests.”
Doctors took several months to demonstrate an automated implantable cardioverter defibrillator model. But the device was only implanted in people at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1980, the paper reported.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the device in 1985. The two doctors shared a patent for a device whose technology was sold to pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. According to the paper, Muer became director of medical research in Eli Lilly’s department, which developed an implantable cardioverter defibrillator.
“I think Morty has had a bigger impact on the success of Sudden Death treatment than anyone in our profession,” Drs. David Kenom, a cardiologist and longtime friend from Los Angeles.
The device “proved to be better than medicine for treating arrhythmias, and they did it against all odds at a small hospital in Baltimore,” Kenom added. “And over the past 40 years it has proved to be reliable” and has saved many lives.
Muer, a Baltimore native who grew up in Frederick, attended Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland Medical School. He worked in hospitals in Baltimore and served in the Army before beginning his professional career in Sinai in 1966 as an investigator on a coronary drug project. In the 1970s and 1980s he was the head or interim cardiologist of the hospital. It was renamed the Sinai Hospital Medical Office Building in 2005.
Later in his career he was a consultant or executive for several medical companies.
“He continued his research and worked until his death,” his son Mark Moore, of Beverly Hills, California, wrote in a newspaper letter. “He didn’t want to lose even a second of his life.”
Mower has received numerous awards, including a National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002. He is also involved in numerous Jewish charities. One group, the Jewish National Fund – USA – praised him for his efforts to raise funds for water infrastructure, education and community centers in Israel. Muer and his 57-year-old wife, Toby, visited Israel a week before he died.
“As a medical inventor, his innovations have revived the hearts of millions, but he has also given the entire nation, the land and the people of Israel,” Russell F. Robinson told the news.
In addition to his wife and son, Mauer is survived by a daughter, Robin Sarah Moore of Denver; And three grandchildren.
Source: Huffpost
