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Orvan Walter Hess | |
|---|---|
| Born | June 18, 1906 Baoba, Pennsylvania, United States |
| Died | September 6, 2002(2002-09-06) (aged 96) |
| Alma mater | Lafayette College,University at Buffalo |
| Known for | Penicillin Fetal heart monitor |
| Awards | AMA Scientific Achievement Award |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Medicine (obstetrics and gynaecology) |
| Institutions | Yale-New Haven Hospital Yale School of Medicine |
Orvan Walter Hess (June 18, 1906 – September 6, 2002) was an American physician noted for his early use ofpenicillin and the development of thefetal heart monitor.Hess was born inBaoba, Pennsylvania. At the age of two, after his mother's death, the family moved toMargaretville, New York where he grew up. Hess was inspired by DoctorGordon Bostwick Maurer—who started Margaretville's first hospital in 1925— to study medicine. He married Dr. Maurer's sister, Carol Maurer, in 1928.
Hess went toLafayette College and was graduated in 1927, and received hisMD from theUniversity at Buffalo. He completed an internship at Children's Hospital inBuffalo, New York and became anobstetrician andgynecologist.
For most of his career, Hess practiced atYale-New Haven Hospital, interrupted byWorld War II service as a surgeon in the48th Armored Medical Battalion attached to the2nd Armored Division in the invasions ofNorth Africa,Sicily andNormandy.
He was clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at theYale School of Medicine. He also served as president of theConnecticut State Medical Society, and director of health services for the Connecticut Welfare Department. Hess died in New Haven at the age of 96.
Hess was predeceased by his wife Carol in 1998. He is survived by two daughters, Dr. Katherine Halloran ofLexington, and Carolyn Westerfield ofHamden; five grandchildren; and five great-granddaughters.
On March 14, 1942,John Bumstead and Hess became the first doctors in the world to successfully treat a patient (Anne Miller) withpenicillin.
"Doctors had done everything possible, both surgically and medically," Dr. Hess said in a 1998 interview with Katie Krauss, the editor ofYale-New Haven Magazine and one of the many babies Dr. Hess delivered. "I went to see her and knew she was dying."
Dr. Hess went to talk to her internist, Dr. Bumstead, and found him asleep in the library. "While I was waiting for him to wake up," Dr. Hess said, "I sat and read the latestReader's Digest, in which there was an article called 'Germ Killers From Earth', about the use of soil bacteria to kill streptococcal infection in animals."
He asked Dr. Bumstead, "Wouldn't it be wonderful if we had something like this gramicidin mentioned in theReader's Digest?" This prompted Dr. Bumstead to speak with some colleagues who were studying penicillin and to obtain some for the patient, Anne Miller. The day after her first injection, Mrs. Miller's fever broke. She lived to be 90 years old, dying in 1999.— New York Times
Hess received theAmerican Medical Association'sScientific Achievement Award in 1979 for his work on this case.
Hess began working on afetal heart monitor in the 1930s as a research fellow atYale University due to his frustration with the limitations of using a stethoscope on a subject with two heartbeats and undergoing contractions.
In 1949, after World War II, Hess returned to Yale and resumed his work, along with postdoctoral fellow Dr. Edward Hon. In 1957, using a six-and-a-half-foot-tall machine, they became the first in the world tocontinuously monitor electrical cardiac signals from a fetus.
Through the 1960s, working with Wasil Kitvenko, the chief of the medical school's electronics laboratory, Dr. Hess continued to improve on the equipment, introducing telemetry and reducing the monitor's size. The device, which allowed monitoring to continue during labor, became one of the most-used tests inobstetrics.
The original machine still resides today in the basement of a building just outside the city of Hartford called the "Hartford Medical Society."