Therapeutic Hypothermia
References to using hypothermia to preserve living tissue date
back to Hippocrates, who advocated packing bleeding patients in
snow.114 Wilfred Bigelow first showed that blood flow could be
entirely arrested in cooled animals without deleterious effects.115
This discovery allowed procedures to be performed on a stopped
heart in a blood-free environment, which made modern cardiac
surgery possible. In fact, using a technique devised by Charles
Drew in which patients were cooled to 15°C