Gerald Graham
Cardiologist whose innovations led to a huge increase in survival rates in children with heart disease
GERALD GRAHAM, the paediatric cardiologist, who has died aged 98, was a refugee from the Nazis who advanced treatment of heart defects in very small children at Great Ormond Street hospital, and helped to build the hospital’s worldwide reputation in this complex field of medicine.
Among the radical innovations at GOS he introduced were the hospital’s first catheterisation unit (the procedure for diagnosing heart conditions by inserting a catheter, a thin flexible tube, into a vein) in 1959.
By 1962 open heart surgery at GOS had become increasingly successful and it became possible to correct complex heart diseases in children of any age. Between 1960 and 1962 Graham oversaw the development of a heart-lung machine capable of being used with young children, infants and even babies, enabling increasingly complex surgery.
As part of an eminent team of paediatric cardiologists, cardiac technicians, cardiac surgeons and experts in children’s intensive care, he helped increase survival rates for complex operations from 10 per cent, the norm elsewhere in the world, to 80 per cent and ultimately 98 per cent, with the most difficult cases from around the world giving the team unprecedented experience in treating rare conditions.
The son of Kurt Greiffenhagen, a dentist, and his wife Erna, he was born Gerd Greiffenhagen, in Berlin on June 27 1918. As a child, he played with the son of Wilhelm Keitel, later Hitler’s armed services’ chief of staff and got to sit 10 metres from Hitler on a number of occasions at the Berlin Olympics.
He moved to Britain in 1937 (the family changed their surname to Graham in 1939), where he was befriended by two upper-class sisters, the Gilleat-Smiths, who taught him to speak with an impeccable English accent. In 1938 his uncle, Kurt Rosenfeld, a prominent anti-fascist campaigner in the US, got him an appointment to have lunch with the Labour MP Aneurin Bevan and his wife Jenny. Bevan managed to get his parents a visa, on condition that they went on to the US when possible, which they did in 1940.
After a succession of jobs in New York, Graham won a scholarship to Carleton College in 1941, where he read Chemistry
Following an introduction to Louis Katz, a renowned physiologist and cardiologist at the Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, Graham was offered the job of a lab assistant there, and was able to take a course in physiology at the same time.
After some months, Professor Charles Wiggers, the doyen of American physiology specialising in electro-cardiovascular functions, requested help from Katz, saying that due to wartime call-ups, he was left as the only teacher. Thus Graham, completely unqualified, became an instructor in physiology at the same time as, secretly, studying for a medical degree at the same level as his students.
Graham’s career in the US was cut short, however, by the McCarthy anti-communist witch-hunts, which – due to his socialist uncle, Rosenfeld – led to him being suspended from his job without pay. Having lost close family members to Nazi persecution and his brother – a gifted conductor – to Stalin’s purges, this was too much to take. With Ilse, his wife, he moved to London and came to the attention of Great Ormond Street, which needed someone with experience in cardiac catheterisation to build up the new Thoracic Unit.
Graham also edited the English edition of the German Medical Monthly for 21 years and significantly helped to reintegrate German medicine into the British and American scene after wartime exclusion, overcoming resistance, not least because he was Jewish.
Gerald Graham’s first wife died in 1988, and he is survived by his second wife, Anthea, and a son and a daughter from his first marriage.