Jesse Edwards, who died of congestive heart failure May 18 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.
Dr. 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 of them stored in a plastic bag at United Hospital in St. Paul.
At the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, where he began his cardiovascular pathology work in 1946, Dr. 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 people 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 Dr. Edwards’.
Dr. Edwards was born in Hyde Park, Mass., to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. He began his education in a one-room schoolhouse. He told family members years later that he might have been dyslexic and made it through the first eight grades in school by eavesdropping on lessons intended for the grade ahead of him.
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 as a cancer researcher, but World War II intervened.
He served as commander in chief of the Central Medical Laboratories of the European theater and 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.
Dr. 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 and what was then the Charles T. Miller Hospital (now United Hospital) in 1960.
Dr. Edwards trained more than 900 physicians and medical students who came to study with him in the Miller Hospital laboratory. They called themselves the “Miller Basement Boys,” a reference to the lab’s location.
For more than 30 years, he ran weekly “show and tell” sessions at hospitals in the Twin Cities area, where he expounded on the mysteries of cardiac pathology. When he had a heart attack recently, his doctor took advantage of his bedridden patient’s expertise by seeking his opinion on other cases.
Dr. Edwards also took pride in inviting students who had been turned down for medical school to train with him for a year. Each went on to gain admission to medical school and to have a successful medical career.
Dr. Edwards was the author of the three-volume “An Atlas of Acquired Diseases of the Heart and Great Vessels” and the companion two-volume, “Congenital Heart Disease.” He suffered a stroke in 1984 but wrote two more books after teaching himself to write with his left hand. He was working on a third book at the time of his death.
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.
