Dr. Michel Mirowski (October 14 1924 – March 26 1990) was born in
WarsawWarsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. It is located on the Vistula River roughly from both the Baltic Sea coast and the Carpathian Mountains. Its population as of 2009 was estimated at 1,709,781, and the Warsaw metropolitan area at approximately 2,785,000...
,
PolandPoland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe . Poland is bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
. He practiced medicine in
IsraelIsrael officially the State of Israel , is a developed state in Western Asia located on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It borders Lebanon in the north, Syria in the northeast, Jordan in the east, and Egypt on the southwest, and contains geographically diverse features within its...
before coming to
Sinai HospitalLifeBridge Health is a Baltimore area corporation operating several medical institutions. These most notably include Sinai Hospital of Baltimore, Northwest Hospital , and various nursing homes and medical office complexes.-Sinai Hospital:Sinai Hospital is a Baltimore, Maryland hospital originally...
in
Baltimore, MarylandBaltimore is an independent city and the largest city in the state of Maryland. The city is located in central Maryland along the tidal portion of the Patapsco River, an arm of the Chesapeake Bay. Baltimore is sometimes referred to as Baltimore City in order to distinguish it from surrounding...
. While there he collaborated with
Dr. Morton MowerDr. Morton Mower is an American cardiologist and the co-inventor of the automatic implantable cardioverter defibrillator. He has served in several professional capacities at Sinai Hospital and Cardiac Pacemakers Inc. In 1996, he became the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Mower Research...
and later Dr. Stephen Heilman's
artificial pacemakerA pacemaker is a medical device which uses electrical impulses, delivered by electrodes contacting the heart muscles, to regulate the beating of the heart...
company to develop the first
implantable cardioverter-defibrillatorAn implantable cardioverter-defibrillator is a small battery-powered electrical impulse generator which is implanted in patients who are at risk of sudden cardiac death due to ventricular fibrillation. The device is programmed to detect cardiac arrhythmia and correct it by delivering a jolt of...
, or ICD.
Mirowski was born as
Mordechai Frydman on October 14 1924, in
WarsawWarsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. It is located on the Vistula River roughly from both the Baltic Sea coast and the Carpathian Mountains. Its population as of 2009 was estimated at 1,709,781, and the Warsaw metropolitan area at approximately 2,785,000...
. When
Nazi GermanyNazi Germany and the Third Reich are the common English names for Germany between 1933 and 1945, while it was led by Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Worker's Party . The name Third Reich refers to the state as the successor to the Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages and the German...
invaded Poland in the fall of 1939, his father renamed him as
Mieczysław Mirowski to try to protect him from the
anti-SemitismAntisemitism is prejudice against or hostility towards Jews, often rooted in hatred of their ethnic background, culture, or religion....
of the time.
Dr. Michel Mirowski (October 14 1924 – March 26 1990) was born in
WarsawWarsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. It is located on the Vistula River roughly from both the Baltic Sea coast and the Carpathian Mountains. Its population as of 2009 was estimated at 1,709,781, and the Warsaw metropolitan area at approximately 2,785,000...
,
PolandPoland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe . Poland is bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
. He practiced medicine in
IsraelIsrael officially the State of Israel , is a developed state in Western Asia located on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It borders Lebanon in the north, Syria in the northeast, Jordan in the east, and Egypt on the southwest, and contains geographically diverse features within its...
before coming to
Sinai HospitalLifeBridge Health is a Baltimore area corporation operating several medical institutions. These most notably include Sinai Hospital of Baltimore, Northwest Hospital , and various nursing homes and medical office complexes.-Sinai Hospital:Sinai Hospital is a Baltimore, Maryland hospital originally...
in
Baltimore, MarylandBaltimore is an independent city and the largest city in the state of Maryland. The city is located in central Maryland along the tidal portion of the Patapsco River, an arm of the Chesapeake Bay. Baltimore is sometimes referred to as Baltimore City in order to distinguish it from surrounding...
. While there he collaborated with
Dr. Morton MowerDr. Morton Mower is an American cardiologist and the co-inventor of the automatic implantable cardioverter defibrillator. He has served in several professional capacities at Sinai Hospital and Cardiac Pacemakers Inc. In 1996, he became the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Mower Research...
and later Dr. Stephen Heilman's
artificial pacemakerA pacemaker is a medical device which uses electrical impulses, delivered by electrodes contacting the heart muscles, to regulate the beating of the heart...
company to develop the first
implantable cardioverter-defibrillatorAn implantable cardioverter-defibrillator is a small battery-powered electrical impulse generator which is implanted in patients who are at risk of sudden cardiac death due to ventricular fibrillation. The device is programmed to detect cardiac arrhythmia and correct it by delivering a jolt of...
, or ICD.
Early life
Mirowski was born as
Mordechai Frydman on October 14 1924, in
WarsawWarsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. It is located on the Vistula River roughly from both the Baltic Sea coast and the Carpathian Mountains. Its population as of 2009 was estimated at 1,709,781, and the Warsaw metropolitan area at approximately 2,785,000...
. When
Nazi GermanyNazi Germany and the Third Reich are the common English names for Germany between 1933 and 1945, while it was led by Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Worker's Party . The name Third Reich refers to the state as the successor to the Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages and the German...
invaded Poland in the fall of 1939, his father renamed him as
Mieczysław Mirowski to try to protect him from the
anti-SemitismAntisemitism is prejudice against or hostility towards Jews, often rooted in hatred of their ethnic background, culture, or religion....
of the time. Later, his French wife, Anna, would call him Michel, by which he became known.
To escape the Nazis, Mirowski fled to
UkraineUkraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Russia to the east; Belarus to the north; Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary to the west; Romania and Moldova to the southwest; and the Black Sea and Sea of Azov to the south. The city of Kiev is both the capital and the largest city of...
, and for the next five years survived under the most appalling conditions. By 1944 he was an officer in a Polish regiment and returned to Poland where, as the war ended, he registered as a medical student at the University of
GdańskGdańsk, also known by its German name Danzig , is a city on the Baltic coast in northern Poland, at the centre of the country's fourth-largest metropolitan area....
. “Warsaw had been completely destroyed, including its ghetto,” he remembered. “None of my family was left. I couldn’t even find our old home.” Mirowski attended medical school there for a year, but gradually came to believe, ”I had to leave Poland. I had become a Zionist. After all that had happened and that I had seen, the Jews had to have a country of their own to survive. As far as Poland was concerned, it had become a cemetery for me. I told myself that I would never return.”
Medical training
Mirowski emigrated to
PalestinePalestine is a conventional name used, among others, to describe a geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and various adjoining lands.As a geographical term, Palestine can also refer to 'ancient Palestine,' an area...
, but no medical schools were operating there in the early post-war years. He returned to Europe to seek training and entered the medical school at
Lyon||-||}Lyon , often Anglicized as Lyons, is a city in east-central France in the region Rhône-Alpes, situated between Paris and Marseille. Its name is pronounced in French and Arpitan, and or in English...
, France, in the fall of 1947. His French was poor, and his English almost non-existent. He listened to the lectures and demonstrations in French and studied medical texts in English as he taught himself both languages.
Graduating in 1954, Mirowski returned to Israel and to a position at the Tel Hashomer Hospital where he became first assistant to Dr. Harry Heller, the chief of medicine, an association which would eventually lead him to his great project. Having decided to practice cardiology, Mirowski studied at the Cardiological Institute in Mexico City and with Dr. Helen Taussig, the pioneering pediatric cardiologist at the
Johns Hopkins HospitalThe Johns Hopkins Hospital is the teaching hospital and biomedical research facility of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, located in Baltimore, Maryland . It was founded using money from a bequest by philanthropist Johns Hopkins...
in Baltimore.
Treating dangerous arrhythmias
For the next 5 years, Mirowski was the sole cardiologist at Asaf Harofeh Hospital, 15 miles from
Tel AvivTel Aviv-Yafo , usually called Tel Aviv, is the second largest city in Israel, with an estimated population of 391,300. The city is situated on the Israeli Mediterranean coastline, with a land area of...
. In 1966, Professor Heller started having episodes of ventricular tachycardia (a dangerous rapid heart rhythm) and died 2 weeks later while at dinner with his family.
Mirowski wondered what could have been done to prevent his mentor’s death. He reasoned that it should be possible to implant a defibrillator in the body that would convert arrhythmias when they occurred. He consulted cardiologists who knew more about such devices. They told him that debrillators could not be miniaturized. In an era when defibrillators weighed 30 to 40 pounds, it seemed preposterous to propose reducing it to the size of a cigarette box.
Mirowski decided that only in the United States could he find the funds and technical support for the project that was becoming almost an obsession for him. Through an American colleague, Mirowski learned of a job at Sinai Hospital of Baltimore, an affiliate of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he would be director of the coronary care unit but have half of his time to work on his defibrillator. So his family, which now consisted of Anna and their three daughters - each of whom would become a doctor -returned to the United States.
For the next 12 years, Mirowski and his colleagues developed their device and miniaturized it to be implanted in patients. On February 4, 1980, the first patient received a defibrillator, installed in an operating room at the
Johns Hopkins HospitalThe Johns Hopkins Hospital is the teaching hospital and biomedical research facility of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, located in Baltimore, Maryland . It was founded using money from a bequest by philanthropist Johns Hopkins...
. Since then, the device Mirowski invented, much improved and further miniaturized, has been installed in millions of patients.
Later life
In the mid 1980s, Mirowski developed
multiple myelomaMultiple myeloma , also known as MM, myeloma, plasma cell myeloma, or as Kahler's disease is a cancer of the white blood cells known as plasma cells. A type of B cell, plasma cells are a crucial part of the immune system responsible for the production of antibodies in humans and other vertebrates...
, a cancer of the blood. When his medical condition became desperate, and fighting against the odds as usual, he insisted on receiving the most intensive
chemotherapyChemotherapy, in its most general sense, is the treatment of disease by chemicals especially by killing micro-organisms or cancerous cells. In popular usage, it refers to antineoplastic drugs used to treat cancer or the combination of these drugs into a cytotoxic standardized treatment regimen...
. When the disease stopped responding, his oncologist raised the possibility of a bone marrow transplantation, then in experimental development for the treatment of myeloma. A near relative as donor would be needed. Did he have a brother? This would have been Abraham, lost in the Holocaust. Mirowski died on March 26, 1990 at the age of 65 years.
Though his work had been ridiculed for many years—someone described it as a “bomb inside the body”—and he was long unable to obtain grants to support the development of the defibrillator, the last 5 years of his life brought Mirowski both recognition and acclaim. Professional societies and leaders of academic medical institutions honored him. He received invitations to write more articles and give more lectures than he could accept. So he picked and chose, accommodating his friends and those who supported him in darker times. Often with his wife or children, he traveled where he wished since now he was welcome everywhere.
When he spoke overseas, Mirowski usually lectured in
EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that developed in England during the Anglo-Saxon era. As a result of the military, economic, scientific, political, and cultural influence of the British Empire during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, and of the United States since the mid 20th century,...
, but he often discussed his papers during the question and answer period in the language of the country he was visiting. He spoke
FrenchFrench is a Romance language globally spoken by about 65 million people as a first language , by 50 million as a second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired foreign language, with significant speakers in 57 countries. Most native speakers of the language live in France,...
,
HebrewHebrew is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Culturally, it is considered a Jewish language. Hebrew in its modern form is spoken by more than seven million people in Israel while Classical Hebrew has been used for prayer or study in Jewish communities around the world for over...
,
PolishPolish is a West Slavic language and the official language of Poland. Its written standard is the Polish alphabet which corresponds basically to the Latin alphabet with a few additions...
,
RussianRussian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe...
,
SpanishSpanish or Castilian is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that originated in northern Spain and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile, evolving into the principal language of government and trade in the Iberian peninsula...
and Yiddish fluently, but he never learned
ItalianItalian is a Romance language spoken by about 60 million people in Italy, and by a total of around 70 million in the world. In Switzerland, Italian is one of four official languages. It is also the official language of San Marino, as well as the primary language of Vatican City...
and refused to learn
GermanGerman is a West Germanic language, thus related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. It is one of the world's major languages and the most widely spoken first language in the European Union. Around the world, German is spoken by approximately 105 million native speakers and also by...
.
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