Dr. Wilfred Gordon Bigelow

Innovative heart surgeon William Gordon Bigelow was instrumental in the development of open-heart surgery and the cardiac pacemaker. As a captain in the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps during the Second World War, he performed transfusions and surgeries in the field. In the laboratory, he was a pioneer in the use of hypothermia to make open-heart surgery safer. Bigelow also discovered that stimulating a heart stopped with an electrical probe would resume its beating, paving the way for the pacemaker. He was a recipient of the Gairdner Award for Medical Science and a member of the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame.