Turns out it's a story about how an atheist becomes converted to the church by being inspired by the "commanding presence" of RMN and other of his great accomplishments.
As I'm reading along one of the comments made was:
"Craig was struck when he learned that the commanding presence belonged to a 95-year-old, but Craig was even more intrigued that this man was held by Missy and Glen as a prophet of God. In fact, Craig was so interested that after the Conference session ended, he did some research and discovered that Russell M. Nelson was a surgeon who had been central to the development of the heart-lung machine—a machine that opened the door for countless lifesaving and life-prolonging operations."
com/A-Letter-from-the-Prophet-to-a-Former-Unbeliever/s/92666?utm_source=ldsliving&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=popular&utm_content=pop2200414
This was news to me so I started a little research. As it turns out, a surgeon by the name of John Gibbons from Philadelphia was the first initiator of developing a successful cardio bypass machine. He and his team worked out of a hospital in Massachusetts. (Forgive me I forget the name contained in the reference below.)
https://www.acc.org/latest-in-cardiolog ... ary-bypass
Dr. Gibbons was later consulted by a surgeon by the name of Clarence Dennis out of Minneapolis who formed and headed a team that did corollary research as well. One of the resident members of Dennis's team was Russell M. Nelson. The medical history library describes Dennis's work below:
"In April 1951, after numerous trials with dogs, Dennis and his team became the first to use a pump-oxygenator to perform open heart surgery on a human patient. Though the machine performed very well, the surgeons were unable to save the six-year-old patient, because her heart defect turned out to be much more extensive than the atrial septal defect they had diagnosed. Dennis's second attempted open heart operation, several weeks later, also failed, when a technician's error caused a fatal air embolism. Dennis continued to improve his heart-lung machine, and in 1955 completed his first successful cardiac operation with it, two years after John Gibbon's first success in 1953."
https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/spotlight/ ... ographical
With the beginning of the Korean conflict in 1951, R.M. Nelson left the research team and served in the army medical corp for which he deserves great thanks. But by the time he returned to Salt Lake City around 1953, Gibbons and Dennis who were heading up and working on the heart-lung by-pass machines were well on their way to perfecting the technology.
I have no doubt that Pres. Nelson made a contribution as a member of Clarence Dennis's team. It's not in question. But the way the article reads one gets the feeling that RMN was THE MAN.
So I'm wondering, am I being picayune? Am I making a mountain out of a mole hill to ask that the church approved magazines paint a slightly more accurate picture of leadership?
Or does this article reflect an ingrained cultural tendency to exaggerate and aggrandize, to puff up the heroic facade of church leadership?
