Dr. Arthur B. Voorhees Jr.; Developed Artificial Arteries

Arthur B. Voorhees Jr., 70, the physician who developed and implanted the first artificial arteries in humans. As an intern in 1947, Voorhees noticed during a post-mortem that tissue had grown around a silk suture left inside a laboratory animal. That discovery led Voorhees to wonder if a cloth tube might serve as an artificial artery. He made his first artificial artery from a silk handkerchief and later used synthetic parachute fabric left over from World War II. Voorhees stitched prosthetic blood vessels for animals on his wife’s sewing machine. In 1952 he successfully implanted the first cloth artery in a human. The doctor never patented the process and other companies and surgeons copied and refined the procedure. Voorhees also developed the portal-cava shunt, which bypasses defective parts of patients’ livers. He retired as chief of the vascular service at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City in 1983 and was a professor at Columbia University’s medical school. In Albuquerque, N.M., on May 12 of brain cancer.