# DeVries et al., "Clinical Use of the Total Artificial Heart" (NEJM, 1984)

**Type:** source
**Status:** Useful
**Confidence:** Medium
**Source Type:** peer-reviewed
**Publisher:** New England Journal of Medicine (Massachusetts Medical Society)
**URL:** https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJM198402023100501
**Updated:** 2026-08-11

## Summary

The University of Utah surgical team's own peer-reviewed report of the Barney Clark implant, published in the *New England Journal of Medicine* fourteen months after the operation. It is the clinical record of the first permanent total artificial heart implantation in a human, written by the people who performed it.

## Useful Claims

- The paper of record is DeVries, W.C., Anderson, J.L., Joyce, L.D., Anderson, F.L., Hammond, E.H., Jarvik, R.K., and Kolff, W.J., "Clinical Use of the Total Artificial Heart", *New England Journal of Medicine*, vol. 310, no. 5, pp. 273–278, February 2, 1984. DOI 10.1056/NEJM198402023100501.
- The authorship is itself the evidence for the fact page's account of who did what: the implanting surgeon (William C. DeVries), the device's designer (Robert K. Jarvik), and the director of the artificial-organs program (Willem J. Kolff) are co-authors on one paper, alongside the Utah cardiology and pathology staff who managed the case.
- The clinical result was reported in a general medical journal under peer review, roughly fourteen months after the December 2, 1982 operation — the Jarvik-7 implant entered the medical literature as a case report, not only as a news event.

## Reliability Notes

Primary tier: a peer-reviewed paper, cited by DOI, retrievable by that DOI regardless of what happens to any publisher URL.

Confidence is Medium rather than High because the article text has not been retrieved — NEJM's archive is paywalled. Everything above comes from the Crossref record for the DOI. Nothing is quoted, and **no clinical figure appears on this page**: not the 112-day survival, not the drive-unit weight, not the stroke count, not any hemodynamic measurement. A number on a `peer-reviewed` page that is not in the paper is the worst failure mode in this corpus, because the tier makes it look checked. Filling in the figures requires a legitimately obtained copy of the article, and that is a known gap rather than a finding.

The authorship is not a neutral party's account. This is the operating team reporting its own case, which is normal for a surgical first and is exactly what makes it primary — but it is not independent evaluation of the outcome, and the bioethics literature the fact page gestures at is a separate body of work.

## Related Pages

- [Jarvik-7 Artificial Heart](jarvik-7-artificial-heart.md)