Dr. James Jude, a thoracic surgeon whose recognition that external manual pressure could revive a stalled heart, and who used that insight to help develop the lifesaving technique now known as cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, died on Tuesday at his home in Coral Gables, Fla. He was 87.

The cause was complications of a Parkinson’s-like neurological disorder stemming from a tick bite, his son Peter said.

In the late 1950s, Dr. Jude was a resident at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, experimenting with induced hypothermia as a way to stop blood flow to the heart by cooling it down and allowing surgical procedures to be performed without fatal loss of blood.

In experiments with rats, he found that hypothermia often caused cardiac arrest, a problem that two electrical engineers down the hall were addressing in experimental work on dogs, using a defibrillator to send electrical shocks to the heart. William Kouwenhoven, the inventor of a portable defibrillator, and G. Guy Knickerbocker, a doctoral student, had seen that the mere weight of the defibrillator paddles stimulated cardiac activity when pressed against a dog’s chest.