C. A. Hufnagel; Artificial Heart Valve Pioneer

Dr. Charles Anthony Hufnagel, a cardiac surgeon who more than 35 years ago devised the first plastic heart valve, died on Wednesday at Sibley Memorial Hospital here. He was 72 and suffered from heart, lung and kidney ailments.

In 1952, Hufnagel implanted the first artificial valve. It was in the heart of a 30-year-old woman at Georgetown University Medical School. The device developed by Hufnagel involved the insertion of a plastic valve into a damaged artery. A plastic ball encased in a tube forced the valve to open and close, permitting blood to flow into and out of the heart as it would through a normal artery.

Since then artificial heart valves have changed, but Hufnagel’s design and procedure were considered major medical milestones.

In 1947, he also participated in the first human kidney transplant at Boston’s Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and helped in the development of the modern heart-lung machine.

From 1969 to 1979 Hufnagel was chairman of the surgery department at Georgetown’s medical school.

Born in Louisville, Ky., Hufnagel began work on organ transplants and plastic heart valves while at Harvard Medical School.

In 1974 he was one of the three-member medical team that evaluated President Richard M. Nixon who had undergone surgery for phlebitis. That evaluation was ordered by U.S. Judge John J. Sirica who was presiding at the trial of the Watergate defendants. Nixon’s attorneys said that the President was too weak to testify because of the surgery, a finding in which Hufnagel and his colleagues concurred.

At his death, Hufnagel--who wrote more than 400 scientific articles--was a professor of surgery at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences at Bethesda, Md., and clinical professor of surgery at George Washington University.