Professor Stephen Westaby, surgeon and writer
4/12/202651 min
Professor Stephen Westaby is a former heart surgeon and writer. During his career he performed over 11,000 operations and pioneered the use of life long artificial hearts as an alternative to donor transplants.
Stephen was born in Scunthorpe in 1948 and went to medical school at Charing Cross Hospital in 1966. The following year he suffered a serious head injury during a rugby match which had a major impact on his personality. He changed from being a shy person lacking in confidence into a fearless, ambitious operator – qualities, he believes, made him entirely suited to being a surgeon.
In 1981 he took up a Research Fellowship in Alabama with John Kirklin, the first surgeon to successfully perform a series of open-heart operations using a heart-lung machine. During his time there Stephen discovered that medical nylon caused some patients to die of post-perfusion syndrome. Following his discovery, the manufacturers of the equipment removed it from the circuit which led to a substantial drop in cardiac surgical mortality.
In 2000 he implanted a revolutionary new heart pump into a man who was terminally ill with heart failure using a device called the Jarvik 2000. Temporary devices – known as bridge to transplant devices – had been used to stabilise patients while they waited for a donor heart but this surgery – transplanting a permanent artificial heart instead of a donor heart was the first of its kind.
Stephen retired from the NHS in 2016. The following year he published Fragile Lives: A Heart Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Theatre which won the BMA President’s Award.
Stephen has two children and lives with his wife in Oxfordshire.
DISC ONE: Wonderful Land - The Shadows DISC TWO: Viva La Vida - Coldplay DISC THREE: Baker Street – Gerry Rafferty DISC FOUR: America - Simon & Garfunkel DISC FIVE: Forever Autumn - Justin Hayward DISC SIX: Moonlight Shadow - Mike Oldfield DISC SEVEN: Go Your Own Way - Fleetwood Mac DISC EIGHT: Rachmaninoff: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43: Var. 18. Andante cantabile Performed by Vladimir Ashkenazy (piano) and London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by André Previn
BOOK CHOICE: Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus by William Harvey LUXURY ITEM: A family photograph CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Forever Autumn - Justin Hayward
Presenter: Lauren Laverne Producer: Paula McGinley
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First 90 secondsLauren Laverne· Host0:00
Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne, and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast from BBC Radio 4. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book, and luxury that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast, but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds. Listeners will also get access to episodes twenty-eight days earlier than everyone else. I hope you enjoy listening. [waves crashing] [classical music] My castaway this week is the surgeon and writer, Professor Stephen Westerby. He's been described as the greatest heart surgeon Britain has ever produced, and his reputation for excellence and innovation stretches around the world. In his long career, he's performed over eleven thousand operations and saved many lives with the new ideas and practices he's brought to his specialism. Though he says if it wasn't for a quirk of fate, he may never have had the guts to do it. He was born in nineteen forty-eight, in the same month as the NHS, and grew up in Scunthorpe. Dexterous and creative, he was at home with a paintbrush as much as a textbook. Gifted but shy, he dreamed of a career in