1925-2002 Biography
Dryden P. Morse, one of our friends and long-time colleague, died on January 18, 2002 at the age of 76. He had suffered for many years from severe and progressively debilitating Parkinsonism. That he was not better known to the pacing community and its practitioners can be attributed in part to his illness, but also to his modesty and humility, and an unwillingness to be in the spotlight. When forced to speak of himself, as in an oral history session, he repeatedly would shift the conversation to the interviewer's accomplishments rather than to dwell on his own.
He became ill during his travel to the Far East in 1983, not only from a severe parasitic infection, but with the obvious onset of Parkinsonism. Years earlier he had become a victim of a professional hazard, poorly recognized at that time: bilateral lenticular cataracts after he had performed many procedures under nonimage-intensified fluoroscopy. It was some time before his infirmities interfered with his professional life, but eventually he was forced to cut back on work, public appearances, and societal activities.
We must recall the context of his early contributions to pacing. In the days of fixed rate ventricular pacing, material and component engineering were in their infancy, and wire fractures and battery failure occurred with distressing frequency. The average implant lasted about 13 months. This was particularly disturbing to Dr. Morse because most of his patients had complete heart block and therefore were dependent on their devices. He was so concerned about the dangers of sudden pacing failure that at one time he proposed implanting a second backup pacemaker in the.opposite side, so that in the event of failure of one of them the other would take over.
Beginning in 1982 he published venous pressure curves associated with and diagnostic of cardiac disease. He was the first to associate the venous and arterial pulses, emphasizing the timing relationship of contraction of the various cardiac chambers. He investigated the irregular action of the heart, the action of digitalis, and studied atrial (then called auricular) fibrillation and prognostically distinguished between cardiac irregularity resulting from atrial fibrillation, and ventricular extra systoles.
Some of Dr. Morse's ideas were extremely far-sighted. For example, in 1956, after pacing the hearts of some of his cardiac surgical patients through external wires and line-powered pulse generators (we must remember that pacemakers had not yet been implanted), he suggested that a pacemaker be developed to synchronize atrial and ventricular contractions. Furthermore, in 1954, he and Dr. Charles Bailey experimented with rotating a flap of atrial myocardium to the ventricle in the hope of constructing a new and physiological Bundle of Kent. When that failed, he worked with industry to produce an external electrical P wave synchronous pacemaker. These innovations brought him together with some of the future stars of cardiac pacing and electrophysiology at the 1958 Rockefeller Symposium on Cardiac Pacing.
He did some of the earlier studies on power transmission to the pulse generator via radio frequency, and actually implanted such pacemakers in a few patients. It didn't end there. Due to his consultative services with Dr. William P. Murphy and the Cordis Corporation, he and few colleagues published the first manuscripts on pacemaker programmability and dual chamber (DDD) pacing. In 1983 he also published A Guide to Cardiac Pacemakers that contained photographs and descriptions of all the then available pulse generators and leads as a reference book for implanters and allied professionals. This work was updated with a second edition in 1986. For some years it remained an invaluable source of information to many of us.
Although Dr. Morse's name does not come to mind immediately when we think of the history of the North American Society of Pacing and Electrophysiology (NASPE), it really should. It was he who had begun to consider the need for a pacing society, so that when the opportunity arose to suggest such a thing at a meeting with several colleagues NASPE became a reality. Once the concept of a society was accepted by the organizers, the next task was to select a name for it. The variety of suggestions, many unprintable, coursed through the airwaves for a few weeks until NASPE was selected.
As a surgeon and clinician, he loved to teach the medical students, residents, and fellows who passed through his service. He is remembered as an inspiring and ingratiating mentor who became for many a role model, a person of great integrity, talent, and imagination, and yet humble and modest about his own contributions. It is for all these qualities that we too should remember and honor him.
- Victor Parsonnet, M.D.
Newark Beth Israel Hospital
Newark, New Jersey
Interview Excerpts
Bundle of Kent operation (2:04 sec.; Real Audio)
Building a P-wave synchronous pacemaker (1:10 sec.; Real Audio)
The drive to inventiveness (4:52 sec.; Real Audio)
Co-founding of NASPE (2:21 sec.; Real Audio)
Pacemaker implantation in a newborn (2:16 sec.; Real Audio)
Excerpted from this interview:
Interviewer: Victor Parsonnet, MD
Date: February 16, 1997
Place: Moorestown, New Jersey
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