Levi Watkins Jr. was a pioneering cardiac surgeon and civil rights advocate who became the first Black chief resident in cardiac surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital and the first Black person admitted to and to graduate from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. On February 4, 1980, Watkins performed the world’s first successful implantation of an automatic implantable cardioverter‑defibrillator (AICD) in a human patient at Johns Hopkins, a device invented by his colleagues Michel Mirowski and Morton Mower. The operation, done on a middle‑aged woman with life‑threatening ventricular arrhythmias, was initially met with skepticism because the device was large and electrophysiology was still in its infancy, but it proved that an internal device could detect and correct dangerous heart rhythms automatically.
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