Interesting fact:
Christian Barnard, world famous surgeon, who performed the first heart transplant
ever; used Mayon Plastic surgical tubing in this surgery!!
C. Walton Lillehei, who was a
fairly famous heart surgeon at the University of Minnesota in the 1948 era, came
to Mayon Plastics and asked if we had a tubing that wouldn’t stiffen in body
fluids for lung intestinal tubing operations, where the tubing is put up the
nose and down into the stomach and into the intestine, the tubing had a balloon
on the end; after 7 days the unit is removed and hurts the patient. Did we have
a tube that wouldn’t stiffen? We didn’t know, but could supply beer tubing of the
correct sizes for trial. They didn’t stiffen. He used these beer tubings with
great success and put us in the literature all over the world. Pretty lucky for
us.
Press release:
Mayon Plastics, inc. is celebrating
its 55th year in the flexible vinyl tubing business (1946 to 2001). Looking
back, I remember after World War II when rubber garden hoses were scarce and
Mayon Plastics made plastic garden hoses for Montgomery Wards, May Company of
Cleveland and Marshall Fields of Chicago, etc. Two shifts a day would run tubing
for garden hose. When the winders came to work in the morning the tubing was
stacked almost ceiling high. We began making surgical tubing in 1948 when Dr. C.
Walton Lillehei asked us to make flexible surgical tubing for lung intestinal
tubes. From then on the literature expanded the export market on these surgical
tubings. Today we supply open heart surgical tubings, Mayon Plastic beverage
tubings approved by Anheuser Busch and Adolph Coors, Eastman Kodak photographic
tubings; and tubings for ice cream mixes, water softeners, kites, dental
equipment, and battery handles. Now we are looking forward to the potential of
further new vinyl tubing usages. A special thanks to you, a valued customer, who
helped us along the way. Without you we could not have attained a successful 55
years in business.
Customer letter:
Medical Distributors (Pty) Limited
P.O. Box 3378
Johannesburg
15th December 1967
Dear Ray,
Dr. Christian Barnard – The Transplanted Heart.
I thought you may want to know that Mayon Tubing was used in this epoch-making operation, which has had so much publicity. I do not know if you ever met Chris Barnard who spent several years with Lillehei (The Cover Story – Time Magazine).
Kindest regards – in haste,
Yours sincerely,
H.J. Kretschmer
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