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Orvan Walter Hess, M.D. (born 1906-06-18, Baoba, Pa.—died 2002-09-06, New Haven, Connecticut) At the age of two, after his mother's death, the family moved to Arena N.Y., and soon thereafter to Margaretville, New York
Orvan was inspired by Dr. Gordon Bostwick Maurer—who started Margaretville’s first hospital in 1925—to study medicine, becoming an obstetrician and gynecologist. He married Dr. Maurer’s sister Carol in 1928.
During his career Dr. Hess served as president of the Connecticut State Medical Society and director of health services for the Connecticut Welfare Department.
Penicillin
On 1942-03-14 Dr. John Bumstead, and Dr. Hess became the first doctors in the world to successfully treat a patient with penicillin.“Doctors had done everything possible, both surgically and medically,” Dr. Hess said in a 1998 interview with Katie Krauss, the editor of Yale-New Haven Magazine and one of the many babies Dr. Hess delivered. “I went to see her and knew she was dying.”
Dr. Hess went to talk to her internist, Dr. Bumstead, and found him asleep in the library. “While I was waiting for him to wake up,” Dr. Hess said, “I sat and read the latest Reader’s Digest, in which there was an article called `Germ Killers From Earth’, about the use of soil bacteria to kill streptococcal infection in animals.”
He asked Dr. Bumstead, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had something like this gramicidin mentioned in the Reader’s Digest?” This prompted Dr. Bumstead to speak with some colleagues who were studying penicillin and to obtain some for the patient, Anne Miller. The day after her first injection, Mrs. Miller’s fever broke. She lived to be 90 years old, dying in 1999.
Dr. Hess received the American Medical Association’s scientific achievement award in 1979 for his work on this case.
Fetal heart monitor
Dr. Hess began working on a fetal heart monitor in the 1930s—as a research fellow at Yale University—due to his frustration with the limitations of using a stethoscope on a subject with two heartbeats and undergoing contractions.His research was interrupted by World War II service as a surgeon in the 48th Medical Battalion attached to Gen. George S. Patton’s 2nd Armored Division in the invasions of North Africa, Sicily and Normandy.
When Dr. Hess returned to Yale in 1949, he resumed his work—along with Dr. Edward Hon, a postdoctoral fellow. In 1957, using a six-and-a-half-foot-tall machine, they became the first in the world to detect and record continuously monitor electrical cardiac signals from a fetus.
Through the 1960s—working with Wasil Kitvenko, the chief of the medical school’s electronics laboratory—Dr. Hess continued to improve on the equipment, introducing telemetry and reducing the monitor’s size. The device, which allowed monitoring to continue during labour, became one of the most-used tests in obstetrics.
Notes
- On 2002-10-06 the New York Times issued the following correction: “…Dr. Hess and Dr. Edward H. Hon were at the forefront of the development of clinically useful devices to record fetal heart rate patterns continuously during delivery to identify patterns that indicated fetal distress. They were not the first to detect and record electrical cardiac signals from the fetus.”
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