John Geddes: early pioneer and advocate of rapid pre-hospital defibrillation

John Geddes was working as a registrar in the cardiology unit of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast when he and his boss Frank Pantridge noted that many patients died suddenly from arrhythmia during myocardial infarction before reaching the safety of a hospital.

The chief culprit—ventricular fibrillation—required rapid defibrillation to restore normal rhythm. To prevent arrhythmia, Geddes and Pantridge realised two innovations were needed. Firstly, the bulky mains powered defibrillators of that era had to be made portable. Secondly, a team to administer this intervention had to arrive in time.

They brought together a group of Belfast doctors and engineers who solved the portability problem, assembling an initial defibrillator model out of car batteries1 that weighed about 70 kg. Then on 1 January 1966, the world’s first mobile coronary care unit was launched, with a trained doctor and nurse travelling with the equipment directly to the patient in response to a GP phone call.

The results were reported in the Lancet in 1967.2 Of 312 calls, 10 patients were successfully resuscitated outside hospital and five survived to the time of reporting. “It has been shown perhaps for …