Welcome to Erin Mankie's Cabinet of Curiosity's, a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm

and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display,

just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

When a vital organ, such as the heart, needs to be replaced, doctors utilize a complicated

device known as a CPB or a cardiopulmonary bypass machine.

The CPB circulates blood and oxygen throughout the body during surgery, essentially acting

as a temporary replacement for one's heart and lungs, hence its other name, the heart

lung machine.

Although the CPB sounds like modern science, something that must have only existed for

a handful of years, right?

In reality, it dates back to 1885, an Austrian German physiologist named Maximilian von

Frey built one, although that was only a prototype.

Then around 1926, a Russian scientist named Sergei Bruchunenko took things a few steps

further.

In the end of that year, he attended a conference where he showed off what he'd been working

on.

He had created his own heart lung machine, which he called the autojector.

When he hooked up an organ, it would extract the blood, warm it in a glass container,

oxygenate it, and then pump it back into the body.

...