Dr. Morton Mower, a former cardiologist who was one of the inventors of the implantable defibrillator, a tiny device that helped countless heart patients, has died, relatives said. He was 89 years old.

Funeral services were held Wednesday for Mower, who died two days earlier at Denver’s Porter Adventist Hospital, the Baltimore Sun reported. Mower was from Maryland but moved to Colorado about a decade ago.

Mower and Dr. Michel Mirowski, a colleague of his at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, began working together in 1969 to invent a miniature defibrillator that could be inserted into a patient’s heart chamber. The device would be used to correct cardiac arrhythmia by means of a small electric shock that returns the heart to its normal rhythm.

“Everybody in the hospital was talking about these two crazy people who wanted to invent an automatic defibrillator,” Mower said in an interview with The Lancet medical journal in 2015.

“If something bad had happened, we would never have recovered,” he added.

In a few months they managed to assemble a model of the defibrillator and prepare it for a demonstration. But it wasn’t until 1980 that one of those devices was placed in a human being, at Johns Hopkins Hospital, the newspaper reported.

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