Michel Mirowski

Michel Mirowski (October 14, 1924 – March 26, 1990) was a physician who helped develop the implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD).

Born in Warsaw, Poland, he practiced medicine in Israel before coming to Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. While there he collaborated with Dr. Morton Mower and later Dr. Stephen Heilman's artificial pacemaker company to develop the first implantable cardioverter-defibrillator.

Mirowski was born as Mordechai Frydman on October 14, 1924, in Warsaw. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in the fall of 1939, his father renamed him as Mieczysław Mirowski to try to protect him from the anti-Semitism of the time. Later, his French wife, Anna, would call him Michel, by which he became known.

To escape the Nazis, Mirowski fled to Ukraine, and for the next five years survived under the most appalling conditions. By 1944 he was an officer in a Polish regiment and returned to Poland where, as the war ended, he registered as a medical student at the University of Gdańsk. "Warsaw had been completely destroyed, including its ghetto," he remembered. "None of my family was left. I couldn't even find our old home." Mirowski attended medical school there for a year, but gradually came to believe, "I had to leave Poland. I had become a Zionist. After all that had happened and that I had seen, the Jews had to have a country of their own to survive. As far as Poland was concerned, it had become a cemetery for me. I told myself that I would never return."

Mirowski emigrated to Palestine, but no medical schools were operating there in the early post-war years. He returned to Europe to seek training and entered the medical school at Lyon, France, in the fall of 1947. His French was poor, and his English almost non-existent. He listened to the lectures and demonstrations in French and studied medical texts in English as he taught himself both languages.

...
Wikipedia