Euryclides de Jesus Zerbini

Euryclides Zerbini (http://educacao.uol.com.br)

Zerbini was born in 1912, in Guaratinguetá, São Paulo, Brazil. He was the son of Italians immigrants. He started the Medicine course by a suggestion from his father, because he didn’t know what to do in his future career. In 1935 Zerbini finished the Medicine course at the University of São Paulo and specialized at the Clinical Hospital in general surgery. In the United States he studied about chest, cardiac and also pulmonary surgery.

Until the 40’s doctors treated heart problems as an unknown things and nobody did cardiac surgeries. In 1957, he started to experiment with heart opening, in animals, and using extracorporeal circulation. At University of Minneapolis, USA, he was a colleague of Dr. Christian Barnard, the first surgeon to perform a heart transplant in the world.

In 1968, Zerbini’s team realized, at Clinical Hospital, the first heart transplant in Latin America and the fifth in the world.

Zerbini was a teacher at USP (University of São Paulo) and he created the “Center for Teaching Cardiac Surgery” which would become, in 1975, the “Instituto do Coração (Incor)”. After some time, as part of the “Incor”, the “Fundação Zerbini para o Desenvolvimento da Bioengenharia” was founded that also exports technology.

During 58 years of his career, Zerbini received 125 honorary titles and many tributes of the governments in all of the world. He was so admired and respected nationally and also internationally and made the Brazil one of the most advanced centers in the world for heart surgery. He died in 1993, at 81 years old, because of a generalized tumor.