Matters of the Heart: Historic Surgery in 1902 Montgomery
Posted on January 31, 2015 by bob in Features
Dr. Luther Leonidas Hill, Jr. (photo courtesy AL Dept. of Archives & History)
Adapted from an article by Ralph Foster
In the early morning hours of September 15, 1902, Dr. Luther Leonidas Hill Jr. was summoned by two local
Montgomery physicians who were attempting to treat Henry Myrick. Myrick, a 13-year-old African American youth, was the victim of a stab wound to the heart the previous afternoon. Six hours passed before the first physicians had been called, and another two hours passed before Hill arrived at the boy’s home. Myrick’s wound had been bleeding continuously, and although he was still conscious, his pulse was fading. Hill convinced the family to let him operate. Widely regarded as an authority on heart wounds, Hill had not actually operated on a living heart.
Hill moved Myrick to a table, and by lantern light began the procedure, assisted by his brother and a fourth physician who had arrived to administer chloroform. Hill opened the youth’s chest and discovered a great deal of internal bleeding within the pericardium, the protective tissue surrounding the heart. To relieve pressure on the injured organ, Hill opened the pericardial sack to drain the blood, then stitched the stab wound, which was in the left ventricle, with catgut thread. The procedure lasted 45 minutes. Myrick survived and within a few weeks had recovered from his injuries.
With this procedure, Alabama’s Luther Leonidas Hill, Jr. became the first American physician to successfully repair a wounded heart in a surgery that the patient survived. The procedure caused a sensation in the popular media and medical journals. The story was reported in the New York Sun, and Hill published his own account of the surgery along with an updated list of heart suture cases in the November 1902 issue of the New York Medical Record. Yet despite his success and advocacy of such procedures, heart surgery did not advance significantly in either the United States or Europe for several decades.
Downtown Montgomery office Dr. Hill shared with his brother. (Photo by Bob Corley)
Hill was born January 22, 1862, in Montgomery, to Rev. Luther L. and Laura Croom Hill. The son and grandson of Methodist ministers. He planned to enter the ministry, but after completing his studies at Howard College in Marion, Perry County (now Samford University in Birmingham), he turned to medicine, graduating from the City University of New York in 1881.
Hill also studied at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, New York Polyclinic Medical School and Hospital, and at King’s College Hospital, London, England, where he worked under Joseph Lister, a pioneer in sterile surgical techniques. Hill returned to Montgomery to establish his medical practice, specializing in surgery, and in 1888 Hill married Lillie Lyons of Mobile. Among their five children was future Alabama U.S. Senator Lister Hill.
Hill retired from practice in 1931, living to see his son Lister elected to Congress and later as senator. Perhaps as a result of his father’s influence, Lister Hill became a champion for public health, sponsoring the Hill-Burton Act which significantly expanded hospital care. Luther Leonidas Hill, Jr., died in Montgomery in 1946 and is buried in Greenwood Cemetery.
In 1959, the University of Alabama Medical Center in Birmingham dedicated the Luther Leonidas Hill Heart Center in his honor. In 2001, Hill was elected posthumously to the Alabama Health Care Hall of Fame. The downtown Montgomery office he shared with his brother Robert still stands and bears a historical marker placed by the Alabama Historical Association.
Information courtesy Encyclopedia of Alabama, www.encyclopediaofalabama.org.
