Jeremy Swan and the pulmonary artery catheter : Paving the way for effective hemodynamic monitoring

302 Dr Harold James Charles “Jeremy” Swan was born in the small town of Sligo, Ireland, on 1 June 1922. He was the son of two Catholic doctors in a family of four brothers. As a young boy he attended St. Vincent College in Dublin, where his education was interrupted when he lapsed into a coma after being diagnosed with meningitis, a commonly fatal disease in the days before penicillin. His life was saved when his mother provided him with sulfa drugs, the only antibiotic available in that era. He made a full recovery and excelled not only as a scholar but also as a middleweight boxer. Swan completed his medical training at St. Thomas’s Hospital Medical School at the University of London. After graduation he worked for 6 months as a casualty surgeon before joining the Royal Air Force. He spent 2 years with the military serving as a medical director, primarily at a hospital in Iraq. Swan had originally planned to go back to Sligo to join his father in family practice. Unfortunately, his father passed away in 1948 before this could happen, so Swan abandoned these plans and instead embarked upon a research career in cardiovascular physiology in London under the guidance of Dr Henry Barcroft. In 1951, Swan took a research fellowship at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, under the direction of Dr Earl Wood. He continued his earlier work in the catheterization laboratory, conducting research on pulmonary hypertension in congenital heart disease and developing techniques for measuring cardiac output and cardiac shunts. He was successful in bringing one of the first research grants to the Mayo Clinic and was a key player in developing the first training program at the institution. During his 14 years at the Mayo Clinic, Swan published over 100 papers and established his reputation as a Jeremy Swan and the pulmonary artery catheter: Paving the way for effective hemodynamic monitoring