As she sat last week at her dining room table, Rozalija Gannon searched for a sympathy card that serves as a lasting testimonial to her late husband's influence.
Dr. Paul Gannon was a heart surgeon in the Twin Cities for 40 years and worked among some of the region's biggest names in medicine, at a time when doctors here helped develop cardiac pacemakers and other innovations that changed the way physicians around the world care for heart patients.
No less significant, though, is the sympathy card on Rozalija Gannon's table, which her daughter Mary Ann Heine retrieved to show a visitor.
It conveyed thanks from the relatives of a man who underwent emergency heart valve replacement in 1985. Gannon successfully performed the operation, the card explained, and the procedure granted the man another 31 years with his family plus a lasting connection with his doctor.
"He would stick with the patients, and stay with them and sit down — he would talk with them and get to know them," Heine said. "He wanted people to live."
Gannon, 89, of Golden Valley, died this month following a heart surgery career in which he helped the wonder of open-heart surgery transition into a new standard of medical care.
He was born in New Jersey. After attending medical school at Marquette University in Milwaukee, his training ultimately culminated in 1963 at the University of Minnesota, where he earned his Ph.D. about five years later.
Minnesota was the world's hotbed for heart surgery, said Dr. Rosemary Kelly, chief of cardiothoracic surgery at University of Minnesota Health.