Defibrillator

A defibrillator is a device that delivers an electrical current to the heart to treat life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias, specifically ventricular fibrillation and non-perfusing ventricular tachycardia, by interrupting chaotic electrical activity so a normal rhythm can resume. The Swiss physiologists Jean-Louis Prevost and Frederic Batelli first showed in 1899, working at the University of Geneva, that electric shocks could both induce and reverse ventricular fibrillation in dogs, and the electrical engineer William Kouwenhoven developed the external defibrillator in 1930 while working at Johns Hopkins University. The surgeon Claude Beck of Case Western Reserve University achieved the first successful human use in 1947 during open-heart surgery on a 14-year-old boy, and the device later evolved from open-chest models through portable closed-chest units in the 1960s to today's automated external defibrillators that untrained bystanders can operate.