Mother Teresa de Calcutta had one and Elton John continues with his: the pacemakers with her electrical impulses put the heart of millions of people around the world.

In making it beating properly, they also mark the passage of extra time that allows us to live.

Not only has it saved millions, but often their quality of life has often improved.

But who came up with something as risky as putting a device inside the body to take care that one of our most precious organs continues to pump blood?

About giant shoulders

Like so many scientific and technological stories, it is the result of accumulated knowledge for centuries.

And as in so many cases, the starting points are difficult to establish.

We could start with Aristotle, who conceived the heart as "the origin of every movement, because it is the one that links the soul with all the organs of life."

Since the first step must necessarily be the understanding of the functioning of the heart, the description of the classical Greek philosopher (384-322 BC) has been qualified by experts as "remarkably accurate in terms of cardiovascular physiology."

Regarding the heart, Aristotle also succeeded.

The other indispensable step was to understand that applying electricity to the body could be beneficial, so we did not even understand the reason.

The Romans, for example, used the electrical impulses of sea creatures such as electric stripes to treat acute Dolores and gout.

But it was in the 18th century when the first studies on the effects of electrical energy were carried out when applying it to the body.

The involuntary contribution of chickens

Since the mid -seventeenth century publications began to pass speculating on the bioelectric nature of the cardiovascular system.

In the following century, the fascination of scientists with electricity was more than evident ... Does any of these names of the great minds that were doing experiments that led to the basic understanding of this force sound?

We could add that of the Danish physicist Nickolev Abildgaard.Although his name is not so well known, he went to whom in 1775 it occurred to him to put some electrodes on both sides of the head of a chicken.

And, of course, he released an electric shock.

He gave him a tremendous shock.

The chicken fell dead but, fortunately for her - if it is that the situation in which she was accommodated to the good fortune -Abildgaard had not terminated her experiment.

He began to put the electrodes in other parts of the body, without obtaining any favorable result for the chicken or for him, until he put them on the chest.

The chicken got up and, staggering, left.

He had risen as by magic!

It was the first defibrillation of which you have registration.

In addition, it was the moment when the future of defibrillation machines began that we now see not only in hospitals, but also in ambulances, offices, gyms and, often, on television series.

The alert cry "all back" is often heard in TV programs before a person receives a download.

Interfering with the will of God

About 150 years later, in 1932, American physiologist Albert Hyman made an apparatus he called "artificial pacemakers", which worked with a crank engine.

It was the first gadget designed to control heartbeat.

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Only was not the only one: on the other side of the ocean, Australian anesthesiologist Mark Lidwell had managed to independently as there is: develop the first machine for cardiac regulation.

Hyman used it in animals but never published any studies of experiments with humans, something that at that time would not have been seen with good eyes even for his colleagues.

In the 30s of the last century, the artificial stimulation of the heart was a very controversial issue.

At that time, death was defined as the unemployment of heart activity and the absence of pulse.

The generalized perception was that "prolonging life" and "reviving dead" was to interfere with nature and, even worse, with the will of God.

We had to wait to "interfere with the will of God."

The medical community and society were not ready for electrostimulation so the pacemaker was cataloged as a pot, in the best case, or a devil's machine, at the worst.

Not even before the tragedy of World War II the US army paid attention to Hayman's cry to use their creation to resurrect soldiers.

When the war passed

Despite the initial failure, the road was already open.

In the early 50s, pacemakers were developed connected to the electricity supply and were portable.

Although on the latter it must be clarified that they were only in the sense that they were such large boxes that moved them on wheels to the places where they were necessary ... as long as there was a shot on the wall to connect them and notThey need to move further than the cable allowed.

However, innovatives soon created smaller pacemakers, some even that could be taken hanging from the neck, racing the way for the arrival of internal pacemakers.

As well as the external ones, the internal pacemakers have shrunk and improving.

Among them, Colombians Alberto Vejarano Laverde, doctor, and Jorge Reynolds Pombo, an electronic engineer, who in 1958, built an external pacemaker that weighed 45 kg, fed with a battery and worked connected to electrodes placed in the heart.

That same year, in Sweden, surgeon Ake Senning and the doctor inventor Rune Elmqvist developed a system and made the first implant of a totally internal pacemaker.

The beneficiary was a 43-year-old engineer named Arne Larsson, who had been hospitalized for a complete cardiac block and frequent attacks of Stokes-Adams syndrome for six months.

His prognosis was very bad.

In secret

To avoid advertising, the implementation of the pacemaker was carried out at night when the operations rooms were empty.

With two electrodes implanted in the myocardium and connected to the pacemaker's impulse generator placed on the abdominal wall, Larsson's heart regained its rhythm ... for a few hours.

"It lasted only eight hours," said Senning, who presumes that he damaged him when implanting it.

"The other pacemaker I had in the laboratory, so I implanted it the next morning."

The second pacemaker worked well for about a week.

This was the first implementation of an internal pacemaker.

A historical meeting in Zurich, Switzerland, to mark the 20th anniversary of the first implant of a pacemaker.From left to right: Swedish cardiac surgeon Ake Senning (1915 - 2000), who did the operation, Dr Rune Elmqvist (1906 - 1996), who developed technology, and Arne H. W. Larsson, the original recipient of the pacemaker.The operation took place on October 8, 1958.

As ElMqvist used silicon transistors in the circuit, the need for energy was minimized.

The whole unit was handmade and was encapsulated in a resin that had an excellent biocompatibility.

Its approximate diameter was 55 mm, and its 16 mm thickness.

Larsson lived longer than the engineer and surgeon who had saved his life.

He had 11 different pacemaker models in his entrails until his death for cancer at 86 years of age.

Today there are pacemaker the size of a currency that do not need cables and get into the heart.

The most advanced: without cables and a tenth of the size of the traditional pacemakers.A sensor determines whether or not to stimulate the heart according to its activity.And lasts between 7 and 10 years.