In memoriam: John Joseph Gallagher MD: a founder and pioneer of modern clinical electrophysiology (March 3, 1943, to November 21, 2020)

Excerpt

John Gallagher was born in Brooklyn, New York, and completed his undergraduate studies at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts. He graduated magna cum laude from the Georgetown University Medical School in 1968 and interned at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. In 1970, he was drafted and joined the United States Public Health Service Hospital, Staten Island, New York, where he worked with Anthony Damato and Benjamin Scherlag where he developed his lifelong interest in clinical cardiac electrophysiology. In 1972, he returned to Duke University and joined the faculty in 1974 to lead the electrophysiology program. His classic investigations in electrophysiologic evaluation of supraventricular tachycardias imparted global stature to his center. These classic studies now form the basis of the modern classification of preexcitation syndromes that is in vogue today. In collaboration with surgeon Will Sealy and others, the Duke team under his leadership pioneered the intraoperative mapping of accessory pathways for surgical ablation. Collaboration with biomedical engineers led to the development of epicardial mapping with a “sock based” epicardial array, employed by many leading centers including ours, for intraoperative mapping for surgical ablation in the eighties and beyond. He was one of the earliest practitioners of alternative energy sources of ablation using cryoablation techniques. An early proponent of atrioventricular junction ablation with a catheter technique using direct current shock therapy, his mapping work laid the infrastructure of the field of modern catheter ablation.

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