Mower, co-inventor of implantable defibrillator, dies at 89

A cardiologist who helped invent an automatic implantable defibrillator that has helped countless heart patients live longer and healthier has died

BALTIMORE -- Dr. Morton Mower, a former Maryland-based cardiologist who helped invent an automatic implantable defibrillator that has helped countless heart patients live longer and healthier, has died at age 89.

Funeral services were held Wednesday for Mower, who died two days earlier of cancer at Porter Adventist Hospital in Denver, The Baltimore Sun reported. The Maryland native had moved to Colorado about a decade ago.

Mower and Dr. Michel Mirowski, both colleagues at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, began working in 1969 on developing a miniature defibrillator that could be implanted into a patient. The device would correct a patient’s over-rapid or inefficient heartbeat with an electric shock to resume its regular rhythm.

“It was the talk of the whole hospital that these two crazy guys are going to put in an automatic defibrillator,” Mower said in a 2015 interview with The Lancet medical journal. “If something had gone awry, we would have never lived it down. We were these two crazy guys who wanted to put a time bomb in people’s chests, so to speak.”