Inspired by the scientific discoveries of the late 19th - early 20th centuries, man began to actively improve the world around him. In the USSR, this also coincided with the desire to demonstrate to the whole world the greatness of the socialist system and the triumph of science over religious prejudices. I wanted not only to turn back the rivers, but also to create a superman, to defeat aging and death. It's good that they started training on animals.
The living head of a dead dog
The genius physiologist Sergei Sergeevich Bryukhonenko was born into a family of engineers. He has been inventing since childhood. However, he connected his life with medicine. Immediately after graduating from Moscow State University, Bryukhonenko was drafted into the army. The First World War was going on, so the young doctor immediately gained solid experience in practical surgery. The impossibility of saving someone's life must have pushed him to research on maintaining the functions of the whole body or its individual parts with the help of artificial circulation.
Already in 1925, Bryukhonenko patented an auto-light, a device that saturated blood with oxygen and pumped it into the patient's body through a system of tubes. It was primitive and intimidating, but it coped with its function. One pump pumped blood from the vena cava and pumped it into isolated lungs, where oxygen saturation took place. A little later, Bryukhonenko will come up with an oxygenator that performs this task, but the first auto-light used what nature had created. The oxygen-enriched blood entered the reservoir, from where it was pumped into the arteries by another pump. The contact pressure gauge automatically maintained the required pressure, and the heating system maintained the temperature.
The effectiveness of the device was confirmed by the experiment on November 1, 1926, when an auto-light kept a dog with a cardiac arrest for two hours. On June 1, 1928, Bryukhonenko showed the device at the Third Congress of USSR Physiologists. Then the severed head of the dog was connected to the artificial blood circulation system. At the same time, the main physiological functions were preserved. The pupils reacted to the light, their eyes blinked, and when they hit the table, their head shook. She even ate a piece of cheese, although it immediately came out of the esophagus.
Of course, this experiment was not carried out in order to surprise someone or draw attention to the achievements of Soviet science, although this was also possible. Already from 1929 to 1937, the auto-light was successfully used in open-heart surgery on dogs, performed by the surgeon Nikolai Terebinsky. Together with the bubble oxygenator invented by Bryukhonenko in 1936, this device became the prototype of modern heart-lung machines (“artificial heart - lungs”), which are now successfully used in heart surgery in humans. True, the auto-light itself was never used for these purposes.
Sergei Sergeevich did not stop there and actively continued his experiments. He supported the work of organs harvested from the body in order to study the possibilities of artificial circulation. An experiment was carried out to revive the dog: all the blood was pumped out of it, after which it was dead for about 10 minutes. Then she was connected to the apparatus, the blood was returned, and the animal's heart beat again, and physiological reactions were restored.
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In 1940, a documentary film "Experiments on the revitalization of the organism" was filmed, which showed the work of an auto-light, a living head and the resurrection of a dog. It stated that after returning from the other world, animals live for years, grow, gain weight and have offspring.
Of course, it was not experiments with a dog's head that formed the basis of the famous novel by Alexander Belyaev, because its first version was published back in 1925, but the analogy is obvious.
Resurrected cats
Soviet pathophysiologist Joachim Romanovich Petrov studied the possibility of revival from a different point of view. He was interested in the body's ability to return to a full life. And for several years he experimented at the Military Medical Academy. SM Kirov and the Leningrad Institute of Blood Transfusion.
Animals were revived after various types of death: from suffocation, electricity, chloroform poisoning, significant blood loss and oxygen starvation. We used different methods of resuscitation: heart massage, injection of adrenaline into its cavity, electrical stimulation, artificial respiration and blood transfusion.
As a result of experiments, it turned out that breathing and heartbeat can be restored even an hour after death, but such animals are completely unviable, because nervous functions are lost, only automatic ones remain. Petrov managed to find out in what types of death certain resuscitation measures are more effective. It became clear that if cardiac and respiratory functions are restored within three minutes after their loss, the animal has an excellent chance of a full life.
Cats were used for the experiments. Animal rights activists, of course, would not approve of this, but thanks to these experiments, resuscitation has developed.