While the surgeon massaged the man’s heart manually, the article said, “a makeshift ‘defibrillator’ was rigged to administer instantaneous electric shock treatment.”

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The article described a process that was shocking in more ways than one. When the man’s heart went into ventricular fibrillation — an event that means death in less than five minutes — operating room workers hooked two copper electrodes to an examining lamp that happened to be in the room, touched the other ends to the man’s heart, and shocked it into normal rhythm.

The operation was postponed, and four hours later, the article reported, the patient died in his hospital room.

The “Philadelphia specialist” who dared to attach the wires “requested that his name be withheld from publication,” no doubt with good reason. But whoever he was, he was probably up to date on the latest in defibrillation. He may have known of a report, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association seven months earlier, of the first case of ventricular fibrillation in a human successfully treated with electric shock — an apparently dead 14-year-old boy brought back to life. He did not read of it in The Times, which took no note of it.

The Times did not mention defibrillators again until Jan. 23, 1957, under the headline “Shock Treatment for Heart Urged.” The unsigned article reported that “Equipment for defibrillation in the operating room has been developed and is now employed at Johns Hopkins and several other hospitals” and that the researchers were “working on the development of defibrillating equipment that might be used in the field.”