Seymour Furman, who died Monday at 74, was a surgeon who, in the late 1950s, developed the first pacemaker that stimulated the heart from within, using tiny jolts of electricity. It was a major advancement in cardiac therapy that led directly to today’s miniaturized pacemakers; it improved and extended millions of lives around the world.

Furman was at Montefiore Hospital and Medical Center in the Bronx for a half-century, and was an internationally recognized expert on pacemakers and associated technologies. Among the devices he helped invent and develop were portable pacemakers, children’s pacemakers, and telephone monitoring, which allows patients to have their pacemaker evaluated and sometimes even adjusted without going to a doctor’s office.

Furman declined to patent his devices, and when he worked with companies that produced pacemakers, he insisted that they not cover their advances with patents, the head of Montefiore’s arrhythmia service, Dr. John Fisher, said. More than 150,000 new pacemakers are implanted each year, according to the Heart Rhythm Society, a research and advocacy group that Furman founded in 1979.

Furman grew up in Brooklyn, the son of garment workers from Poland and Lithuania. He attended Stuyvesant High School and New York University, and then the SUNY Downstate College of Medicine. In 1955, he began an internship at Montefiore, where he stayed for the rest of his career. In later years, he was a professor of surgery at the associated Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

At Montefiore, Furman immediately got involved in cardiac research and did early experimental surgery, which tested pacemakers on dogs. The pacemaker was a relatively new device then, having been invented in 1950, but was generally used in life-saving situations, rather like a defibrillator is today. For longer-term use, installing a pacemaker involved opening up the chest cavity to place the electric leads directly on the exterior of the heart.

In 1958, Furman showed that the wires could be directed to the inside of the heart using a catheter through blood veins, making major surgery unnecessary. After a short-term test during an intestinal operation on one patient, Furman installed the wires in the heart of a 76-year-old retired clothing salesman from Brooklyn with arrhythmia that was so bad, the Associated Press reported, “Attendants would strike him in the chest with their hands to nudge the weakened heart back into action.” After 96 days in the hospital hooked up to a bank of electronic equipment, the patient improved enough that the wires were removed, and he was able to go home. Saving a patient’s heart and life with electricity was big news. A wire photo printed on the front page of the Daily News on November 27, 1958, showed Furman lighting the patient’s celebratory stogie. The patient survived for more than three years.

But what killed the patient was a return of the arrhythmia; what was needed was a portable, waterproof device that would provide continuous stimulation to the heart, and Furman’s tackled this problem next. In 1959, he fitted a 67-year-old part-time silverware salesman from the Bronx with a portable device, making him the first patient ever to leave the hospital with a pacemaker. The man was pictured holding the power unit, which, with its dials and levers, bore a slight relationship to a GameBoy. “We’ll just have to play this by ear,” Furman told the New York Times. “This has never been done before. We’ll have to see how he gets along.” The patient got along “fairly normally” for more than three years.

Furman’s experimental procedures resulted in a lead article in the New England Journal of Medicine, one of more than 1,000 publications featuring Furman during his long career.

Many improvements came in the ensuing years, including implanting the total unit, extending battery life, miniaturization, and transtelephonic monitoring. So widespread did the technology become that Furman took to collecting variations on the device from around the world, sometimes swapping them with colleagues at international meetings. His son, Bruce Furman, estimated the collection at more than 1,000 units.

In addition to making hundreds of presentations and organizing conferences on pacemakers, Furman in 1977 founded the journal Pacing and Clinical Electrophysiology, PACE, which he edited for many years.

Seymour Furman

Born July 12, 1931, in the Bronx; died February 20 at his home in the Bronx; survived by three sons, Bruce, Neil, and Gary; his wife of 45 years, Evelyn Katz, died in 2002.