Luckily, Dr. Billy Cohn and Dr. Bud Frazier from the Institute came up with what they call a “continuous 

flow” device which would let blood to circulate through his body without a pulse.  They detached Mr 

Lewis’ heart and then connected the device -the patient was up, well and speaking with doctors the 

very same day.

 

Dr. Cohn is a expert surgeon, as well as an discoverer and scientist who has consumed a large part of 

his life developing technologies to substitute or repair the human heart. The most distinguished device 

being what is called the Left Ventricular Assist Device, also termed as LVADs.

Cohn teamed up with Dr. Bud Frazier to make a new discovery that uses the technology from 

LVADs to duplicate the functions of the heart’s right and left ventricles.  They (inappropriately) 

tried their device on 70 calves, all of whom gave a flat line on an EKG, no heart rate or pulse,

 yet they were flawlessly normal, ate normally and related with each other normally but again, had 

no heartbeat.

As stated above, Craig Lewis was the first human to take this technology. The process took less

 than 48 hours and was a big success. His kidneys and liver were not so lucky though, they were

 fading him and after a few months his family asked the doctors to disconnect the device.

Below is a clip named “Heart Stop Beating.” It’s the story of these two doctors and the procedure 

they had to go through to substitute this man’s dying heart with a ‘continuous flow’ device.