Prof Frank Pantridge: Frank Pantridge, who has died aged 88 after a prolonged illness in Belfast's Royal Victoria Hospital, made his name there in the 1960s with his invention of the portable cardiac defibrillator. He was recognised internationally as having saved many lives by transforming treatment for heart attacks.
His insight was to realise that chances of survival drop by up to 10 per cent for every minute after an attack without treatment, and that the bulk of attacks happen in normal life, outside hospital wards.
He invented a defibrillator - to shock the heart out of the "fibrillation" or quivering which starves the organ of oxygen - to run on car batteries.
The first cardiac ambulance or Mobile Intensive Care Unit followed. This pre-hospital coronary care was named the Pantridge Plan.
Pantridge completed his revolution by pioneering a specialist care unit in the Royal Victoria.
A spokesman for the hospital said on his death: "It was thanks to Professor Pantridge and his colleagues that in the the late 60s Belfast was often described as the safest place in the world to have a heart attack."
But in the eyes of colleagues, friends and former patients his achievements were not adequately recognised.
On his death, the Belfast Telegraph noted acidly that "on two counts the Ulster doctor's contribution to global medicine was overlooked in the UK. His invention of the portable defibrillator was not introduced in ambulances in England until 1990, 25 years after he pioneered it in Belfast, a delay which cost countless lives. Professor Pantridge was also neglected by the honours system."
He received a CBE, not the knighthood many thought he plainly merited.
Prof Sidney Lowry, Frank Pantridge's house officer in the early years of the cardiac ambulance, said: "His autobiography An Unquiet Life makes clear that he did not suffer fools gladly. Perhaps because of this he was not knighted." Ulster Television runs an interactive site for comments, usually anonymous, on the news. When Prof Pantridge died "Deborah from Newtownards" wrote: "It is only because of the work of this wonderful man that I am alive today. My mother was a patient of his, having her first heart surgery in 1954 in the Royal Victoria Hospital. It always annoys her when the New Year Honours List comes out and Prof Pantridge has been overlooked again in favour of rock/pop singers. Although we always thought the respect of his patients and his work was worth more than ten knighthoods."
He was born into a modest farming family near Hillsborough, Co Down in 1916 and attended Friends School Lisburn, then Queen's University, Belfast, graduating in 1939.
When war was declared, he volunteered immediately and was posted to the Far East as a medical officer. He was awarded the Military Cross for "being absolutely cool under the heaviest fire" in the battle for Singapore, then suffered cruelty and starvation as prisoner of the Japanese and slave labourer on the Siam-Burma railway, including several months in the death camp of Tanbaya.
He belonged to the "F Force", ordered to march for more than 180 miles through the jungle after a 1,200 mile rail journey. His interest in cardiology began when he contracted cardiac beriberi and his heart swelled to three times its normal size.
Frank Pantridge often said later that President Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved the lives of many prisoners.
His hatred of Japan was deep and lasting. In 2001 he told the Belfast Telegraph that the first time he saw a Japanese man in Belfast he "threw a pint of beer in the face of the bastard".
After the war he won a scholarship to the University of Michigan where he worked with a world authority on electrocardiography, F.N.Wilson.
He came back to the Royal Victoria in 1950 to launch a cardiology unit much-lauded in medical journals but also in North American journalism, Time magazine and the New York Times focusing on his advocacy of mouth-to-mouth ventilation and chest compression to maintain circulation (CPR).
Pantridge said he "stumbled on some epidemiological data" showing that 60 per cent of the young and middle-aged males most prone to acute myocardial infarction (heart attack) died within an hour of the onset of symptoms, more than 90 per cent of the deaths caused by ventricular fibrillation.
He homed in on the necessity for immediate correction, by a lay-person if necessary. The first portable defibrillator in 1965 weighed 70 kg but by 1968, using a miniature capacitor he developed for NASA, it had been shrunk to 3 kg. There should be one, he said, beside every fire extinguisher.
American journals judged Pantridge to be the foreigner with greatest influence on the development of emergency medical services. President Lyndon Johnson survived a heart attack in Virginia in 1972 thanks to the Pantridge Plan.
It was rapidly adopted worldwide, though not in the rest of the UK. Most planes and ships now carry defibrillators. Frank Pantridge stayed at the Royal Victoria until his retirement in 1982 and was also professor of cardiology at Queen's University. He was appointed CBE in 1978.
Dr Denis Boyle, who trained and worked with him, said: "He was the giant on whose shoulders many of us have stood. His life should be celebrated."
Prof James Francis Pantridge, CBE, cardiologist, born Hillsborough, Co Down, October 3rd, 1916, died Belfast December 26th, 2004