WASHINGTON — Jesse Edwards, who died of congestive heart failure Sunday at St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, Minn., collected hearts — more than 22,000 of them from physicians around the world. His collection is one of the largest of its kind anywhere and continues to be a crucial resource for training doctors.
Edwards, 96, a pioneering cardiac pathologist, started the collection in 1960. He wrote 16 books and almost a thousand scientific articles based on his deep analysis of the donated hearts, each one stored in a plastic bag at United Hospital in St. Paul, Minn.
At the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, where he began his cardiovascular pathology work in 1946, Edwards was a member of the clinic’s first open-heart surgery team. His pioneering work on blood vessels of the lung in patients with congenital heart disease allowed doctors to better identify surgical candidates and reduce the mortality of open-heart surgery.
He developed a reputation as the go-to pathologist for consultation on the most baffling and complex cardiovascular cases, and physicians began sending him heart specimens. Recognizing that individuals could teach in death as well as in life, he collected the organs, cataloged and studied them, and wrote and lectured on the lessons he had learned. The collection is now called the Jesse E. Edwards Registry of Cardiovascular Disease.
“He was responsible for so much of the advances in cardiology that helped surgeons understand what they were dealing with,” said Dr. Emil Koretzky, a dermatologist at the Mayo Clinic and a former student of Edwards’.
Jesse Efrem Edwards was born in Hyde Park, Mass., to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. He received an undergraduate degree in 1932 and a medical degree in 1935, both from Tufts University. He began his career at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., as a cancer researcher, but World War II intervened.
He was part of a war-crimes team that went into the Dachau concentration camp three days after its liberation by the Allies. His testimony at war-crimes tribunals helped to convict a number of Nazis.
Edwards joined the staff of the Mayo Clinic intending to resume his cancer research, but the clinic needed a cardiologist and he volunteered. He served on the Mayo Clinic staff for 14 years before joining the University of Minnesota in 1960.
He served as president of the American Heart Association and received the organization’s Gold Heart Award. He also was president of the first World Congress of Pediatric Cardiology.
