Artificial heart pioneer Dr. John C. Norman Jr. dead at 84

[theHandpuppet]

RIP, Dr. Norman. Your skill and vision saved countless lives.

For more on Dr. Norman and his family, please see: http://www.wvculture.org/history/norman.html
Please cross post.

The Charleston Gazette
August 26, 2014
Artificial heart pioneer Dr. John C. Norman Jr. dead at 84
By Rick Steelhammer, Staff writer

Dr. John C. Norman Jr. was born and raised in Charleston. Dr. John Clavon Norman Jr., a Charleston-born, Harvard-educated cardiovascular surgeon and artificial heart pioneer, died Saturday in a Bedford, Massachusetts, acute-care facility. He was 84.

The son of Charleston architect and structural engineer John C. Norman Sr. and Ruth Stephenson Norman, who taught high school English classes in Kanawha County public schools for 53 years, Norman was valedictorian of Garnet High School’s class of 1946, and entered Howard University in Washington, D.C., at age 16. Norman transferred from Howard to Harvard University, where he graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1950. He then enrolled in Harvard’s medical school and, after earning his M.D. degree, spent 1957 and 1958 on active duty with the U.S. Navy, where he served as ship’s surgeon aboard the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga, and attained the rank of lieutenant commander.

Following internship and residency at Presbyterian Medical Center and Bellevue Hospital in New York, he completed his cardiac surgical training at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

In 1962, Norman was a National Institutes of Health fellow at England’s University of Birmingham and, in 1964, he joined the surgical staff at Boston City Hospital while serving as an associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School. - See more at: http://www.wvgazette.com/article/20140826/GZ01/140829437/1419#sthash.uQwfoCma.dpuf