Renowned Cardiologist and Nobel Peace Prize Winner Bernard Lown Dies at 99

By Alexandra Topic, Crimson Staff Writer
Yesterday

Bernard Lown, whose life’s work spanned from pivotal breakthroughs in medicine to humanitarian efforts against nuclear war that won him the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, died at age 99.

Lown died Feb. 16 of complications from congestive heart failure, according to his son Fredric Lown, after a decades-long academic career serving as a professor of cardiology at the Harvard School of Public Health and a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Lown is survived by his three children, Fredric, Anne, and Naomi. His wife, Lousie Lown, died in 2019.

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In 1951, Lown and his colleague Samuel A. Levine discovered that sitting up or walking after a heart attack leads to significantly better outcomes for patients than bed rest, which was the convention at the time. Without Lown’s co-invention of the modern defibrillator a decade later, surgeons would not have had a dependable way to restart a patient’s heart after surgery.

In 1965, Lown opened one of the first coronary care units, which are devoted to the care of patients who have suffered heart attacks, at Brigham Hospital. According to Marshall A. Wolf ’58, former director of the Brigham’s medical residency programs, Lown’s unit brought mortality down by a third — “a huge reduction.” With this success, Lown’s CCU became a model for other hospitals.

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