1924- Biography
Victor Parsonnet, MD was born on August 29, 1924 in Deal, New Jersey. He attended public elementary and high schools in the Weequahic area of Newark, New Jersey and Cornell University. He enlisted in the United States Navy and was enrolled in NYU College of Medicine via the V-12 program in the fall of 1943, graduating in 1947. The following year he received an honorable discharge from the Navy.
He acquired a straight surgical internship at Boston Beth Israel Hospital in 1949 and the following year took a year's residency in pathology at Bellevue Hospital under the tutelage of Dr. David M. Spain. In July of 1949 he moved to the Grasslands Hospital in White Plains, NY for an additional year of pathology. He then went onto a surgical residency at Newark Beth Israel Hospital.
During the Korean Conflict in 1953, while still a surgical resident, he was drafted into the Air Force and was assigned to serve at Ramey Air Force Base in Puerto Rico. In the fall of 1954 he rejoined his residency at Beth Israel, which he completed in 1955.
He studied pediatric surgery briefly with C. Everett Koop, MD at Children's Hospital of Pennsylvania and vascular surgery with Dr. William Blakemore at Columbia University. This was followed by a fellowship with Michael DeBakey, MD in Houston, Texas.
Beginning in 1955 at Beth Israel Medical Center, where he ultimately spent the bulk of his career, he did surgical research in the animal lab and assisted in organizing their first cardiac catheterization lab. While at Beth Israel, he began to assist Lawrence Gilbert, MD with closed heart and, later, open heart surgery. In 1969 after a short visit in Cleveland with Donald Effler, MD, where he learned to do Vineberg implants, he began to do a number of open heart procedures. In 1971 he performed the first coronary bypass surgery in New Jersey.
He also performed the first Cimino shunts for hemodialysis and the first renal and cardiac transplants in New Jersey. He and Edwin Rothfeld, MD reported on their very early experience in telemetric transmission of the ECG obtained in critical areas to remote monitors. Among other innovative ideas in which he played a significant role was the first in-hospital resuscitation program in the country in 1962, using the "Dr. Pacemaker to Room 'X'" emergency page long before Code Blue had become popularized elsewhere. It was also his influence as Director of Surgery at Beth Israel that resulted in cardiac monitoring for all patients under general anesthesia.
Before concluding his career as a cardiac surgeon, having performed 2,500 procedures, he reported his clinical experience with coronary endarterectomy, the benefits of intermittent ischemic arrest and the findings of post-operative coronary angiography. In the 1990s, he and Dr. Alan D. Bernstein, developed a method of risk stratifying open heart surgery procedures, a system that was adopted by the Department of Health in New Jersey as their first method of evaluating the quality of surgery.
Dr. Parsonnet's "pacemaker life" began in 1960 when he became aware of the first implantable pacemakers through the work of Paul Zoll, MD and William Chardack, MD. Having known Dr. Zoll (and his colleagues, Howard Frank and Arthur Linenthal) from his intern days, he was welcomed back and shown their method of anterior thoracotomy epicardial implantation. He did the first such implant at Newark Beth Israel in February, 1961.
In 1962 he introduced a temporary transvenous bipolar pacing lead, sometimes called the Zucker electrode, which has been in use for emergency and temporary pacing since then. Also, in 1962, at the same time as Hans Lagergren in Sweden, he reported the first permanent transvenous (non-thoracotomy) pacemaker implantation. Still later he promoted a previously described but overlooked subcostal (transdiaphramatic) technique for pacemaker implantation and implanted the first DDD pacemaker. Experimenting extensively with biologic power sources, he and George Myers, PhD, developed a piezo-electric generator to be sewn around the aorta. The aortic expansion with each pulse produced enough power to activate a pacemaker for short periods. Still later he proposed to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) the development of a nuclear powered pacemaker and, along with his colleagues Richard Zucker, MD and Lawrence Gilbert, MD, was selected to implant the first 15 of these devices over a 2-day period in 1972. He and Gerhard Lewin, PhD developed the DCD electrode. Because of its extremely small surface area, that electrode had extremely high impedence and low pacing thresholds. The fractal version of this lead, still in use, has prolonged pulse generator longevity. In 1988, in association with Sanjeev Saksena, MD, he reported the first successful non-thoracotomy implantation of an ICD.
Systematic pacemaker follow-up became a matter of considerable interest to Dr. Parsonnet from the very beginning of his association with the field of pacing. In the late 1960s he developed one of the earliest pacemaker follow-up services. He still maintains a computer-based system for patient and hardware follow-up. This was followed by a national pulse-generator registry carried out with Michael Bilitch, MD and Seymour Furman, MD, and was supported by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). These reports, later referred to as the Bilitch Report (and edited by Susie Song, RN, BSN), were published in PACE regularly for 20 years.
Another of his accomplishments is that along with his colleagues, Seymour Furman, MD and Nicholas Smyth, MD, he devised the now universally used 3-position pacemaker code (VVI) that had a major impact on pacemaker and ICD identification lexicon.
Dr. Parsonnet was a co-founder of the International Cardiac Pacing and Electrophysiology Society (ICPES) which has conducted quadrennial world symposiums since 1963. At each of these, he and Dr. Bernstein presented the results of their United States survey on cardiac pacing practices. Along with Seymour Furman, MD, J. Warren Harthorne, MD and Dryden Morse, MD he co-founded the North American Society of Pacing and Electrophysiology (NASPE), the organizational meeting taking place in his office in 1978. He served as the twelfth president of NASPE and was a long-standing member of the board of trustees. He has written more than 700 publications, book chapters and text books, and has made numerous presentations in the fields of cardiac pacing and vascular and cardiac surgery.
| NASPE Founders (from left) |
| Dryden Morse, Seymour Furman, J. Warren Harthorne, Victor Parsonnet |
In academic medicine, for 29 years he conducted the Annual New Jersey Pacemaker Symposium, co-sponsored by NASPE. In 1956 he became the first Director of Medical Education at Beth Israel Hospital in New Jersey. In 1963 he was appointed Director of Vascular Surgery at the hospital and at Seton Hall Medical School (later to become the College of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark). He was also appointed Clinical Professor of Surgery at the New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry in 1980. In 1963 he became Director of Surgery at Beth Israel, a position he held for 27 years. He remains Director of the Pacemaker and ICD Service at the hospital and Director of Surgical Research.
Outside of medicine he is a pianist and avid tennis player. He has also been Board Chairman of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra for 10 years. He was married to Mia Eimer, MD, an internist, for 52 years until her death in 2002. Together they had 3 children and 5 grandchildren.
Interview Excerpts
First attempt at permanent pacemaker (2:46 sec; Real Audio)
DCD electrode (2:25 sec; Real Audio)
Works on first dual chamber pacemaker (2:07; Real Audio)
Excerpted from this interview:
Interviewer: Seymour Furman, MD
Date: December 23, 1998
Place: Bronx, New York
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