Inventive Heart Doctor and Antiwar Activist Dies at 99
(Bernard Lown)
‘It was in 1962 that Dr. Lown, a pioneer in the research of sudden cardiac death, developed a new method for correcting dangerously abnormal heart rhythms, called fibrillations. At the time, they were believed to be responsible for 40 percent of the half-million fatal heart attacks in the United States every year. By administering a precisely timed jolt of direct-current electricity, his defibrillator was able to restore normal heartbeats.
…Dr. Lown’s antinuclear work was more controversial. In 1980, seven American and Soviet physicians, including Dr. Lown and Dr. Yevgeny I. Chazov, a Russian cardiologist and personal doctor to the Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev, founded International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Campaigning against nuclear testing and the arms race, the group had gathered 135,000 members in 41 countries by 1985, when it won the peace prize….’
I was honored to have known Dr Lown in my work for IPPNW and mourn the passing of a great man. He was one of those, along with Elizabeth Caldicott, to argue persuasively that nuclear was must be considered a public health issue and was within the purview of health professionals.
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