Like much of what Lillehei did as a surgeon, there was no precedent for the myocardial wire. There was no way of knowing up front that it would work, that it wouldn’t cause a host of complications—infection, bleeding, scarring—that putting a piece of metal inside the human body and leaving it there, tunneling a portion of it out through a break in the skin that could serve as a portal for germs, wasn’t totally ridiculous. It was impossible to know any of this without trying. But Lillehei, more than any doctor of the twentieth century, specialized in trying the outlandish.
