Cardiac Surgeons. This offering is a Mayo Brothers cachet FDC dated September 1964 and which is signed by some of America's leading cardiac surgeons at the time.Among the signees are:

C. Walton Lillehei, M.D.A Surgery professor at the University of Minnesota Lillehei participated in the world's first successful open-heart operation using hypothermia. Lillehei completed, at age 35, the first successful surgical repair of the heart on September 2, 1952. That historic operation, using hypothermia, was led by his longtime friend and colleague, Dr. F. John Lewis.In 1958, Lillehei was responsible for the world's first use of a external, portable, battery-powered pacemaker. It was invented at his behest by Earl Bakken, whose then-small company, Medtronic, designed and repaired electronics for the University of Minnesota hospital. After the introduction of the first widely used prosthetic heart valves by Albert Starr in 1961, Lillehei also developed and implanted several innovative designs: the Lillehei-Nakib toroidal disc (1966), the Lillehei-Kaster pivoting disc (1967), and the Kalke-Lillehei rigid bileaflet prosthesis (1968).A dedicated educator, Lillehei trained more than 150 cardiac surgeons from 40 nations, including Christiaan Barnard (a fellow University of Minnesota Ph.D. recipient in the 1950s who went on to perform the world's first heart transplant in South Africa).Lillehei returned to St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1975, where he became the director of medical affairs at St. Jude Medical, Inc.Lillehei is often referred to as the "Father of modern heart surgery."

Adrian Kantrowitz ( 1918 - 2008) was an American cardiac surgeon who performed the world's first pediatric heart transplant at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn on December 6, 1967. It was only the second time that a human heart had been transplanted into another human being, taking place just three days after Christiaan Barnard's seminal attempt in South Africa made headlines around the world and ushered in a new era in clinical organ transplantation.

Denton Arthur Cooley ( 1920-) is a pioneering American heart surgeon. In 1969, he became the first heart surgeon to implant an artificial heart designed by Dr. Domingo Liotta in a man. The patient, Haskell Karp, lived for 65 hours on an artificial heart.[1] Cooley and his associates have performed more than 100,000 operations-more than any other group in the world.

Norman Edward Shumway ( 1923 - 2006) was a pioneer of heart surgery at Stanford University. He did his residency at the University of Minnesota. .Shumway became chief of the division of cardiothoracic surgery at Stanford in 1965. He spent many years training promising young residents of cardiothoracic surgery at Stanford.In collaboration with Randall B. Griepp[1], he was the first doctor to successfully carry out a heart transplant operation in the United States in 1968. after Christiaan Barnard's 1967 operation in South Africa. The early years of the procedure were difficult, with few patients surviving for long. Shumway was the only American surgeon to continue performing the operation after others abandoned it after poor results.In the 1970s he and his team refined the operation, tackling the problems of rejection and the necessity for potentially dangerous drugs to suppress the immune system. In particular he pioneered the use of cyclosporine, instead of traditional drugs, which made the operation safer.

Other signers of the FDC are Michael DeBakey,Vincent Gott, John Ochsner, et al

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