Cardiac surgeon Domingo Liotta, inventor of the first artificial heart and Minister of Health of the third government of Juan Domingo Perón, passed away. A moral model of a citizen, interviewed in his house in 2009, said: ¨a Minister of the Nation should finish his mandate with one Argentine peso less than when he started¨.
His Italian father served as a non-commissioned officer in the British Navy on HMS Irresistible. He emigrated to Argentina and entered our Navy in 1907. Domingo was born in a military garrison on November 29, 1924. He graduated as a doctor in 1949 and his dream was already to create an artificial heart.
He worked in several complementary activities. As a surgeon, as an educator philosopher and as Minister of Health of the Nation.
Of cardiac surgery, he said that its practice is an attempt carried out under pressure and “that these treatments must often be carried out under the most hasty and demanding conditions”. He came to the country from the US as Head of the Italian Hospital of Buenos Aires in 1971. In 2010 he was honored by giving his name to the Service. In his autobiographical book ¨¨ Las Aventuras de un Cirujano de Corazón¨¨, Buenos Aires 2008, which he dedicates to medical students and their patients, he declares that philosophical reasoning provided him with a wonderful means to counteract the stress of the profession, as source of calm, understanding and compassion. He wrote there about the journey of Philosophy, especially ancient Greek passing through Kant and the moral law within us, and placing great emphasis on Chinese philosophy, Taoism and Confucianism. In love with the Mystery, Liotta constantly searched for the answer to the eternal enigma of the poetry of Life. Deep down he was a believer who wanted to remain a scientist or a humanist scientist who did not want to stop believing in pure science because he was a researcher. He left advice for the students, which is highly topical in today’s Argentina. He said that: ¨Life never forgets moral debts. You have to have a great capacity to dream and have faith in your own dream, persevering to make it come true¨.
As Minister, Domingo – as he liked to be called – suggested to the other Domingo (Perón), in 1975, to create an Integrated National Health System, assembling all the social works. (Personal interview with Noticias on 12.19.2020). ¨¨It was a system to favor the poorest and most hard-working people, not to include prepayments that are doing well, that is, 65% of the population. In other words, the municipalities and provinces had to adjust and a patient could be treated anywhere. That was repealed by the military government and could never be fixed again. We had installed it in Neuquén as a standard system and it had worked. I presented it in Geneva at the WHO. The figures of the doctor and nurse were protected, even sending them to perfect abroad. It was not a Peronist law but all the political forces of the country intervened¨¨.
Liotta worked ten years in the US. He already worked in Córdoba in 1959 thinking about the design of the first transitory total artificial heart whose perfected model was implanted on April 4, 1969 at the Texas Heart Institute by his friend and teacher Denton Cooley to the patient Karp, who was later transplanted. He developed the Surgery of the Aorta, and a porcine biological valve in Argentina, of which thousands have been implanted in Argentina and continues to be manufactured in the US under another name.
With Dr. Liotta an eminence is leaving, a research heart surgeon and a model of life that Argentina should follow.
by Roberto Battellini
