Larsson, a forty-three-year-old patient (and himself an engineer) who was very near death from a heart arrhythmia as a result of a viral infection. The device failed after just a few hours. The backup was inserted and it lasted for three years, though it kept breaking down and the batteries had to be recharged every few hours. As technology improved, Larsson was routinely fitted with new pacemakers and lived another forty-three years. When he died in 2002 at the age of eighty-six, he was on his twenty-sixth pacemaker and had outlived both his surgeon Senning and his fellow engineer Elmqvist.
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