In 1981, Bruce Reitz and the Stanford surgical team performed the first successful combined heart-lung transplant. The operation built on earlier heart transplant research and extended transplantation to patients whose heart and lungs were both failing. It marked an important step in complex thoracic surgery and demonstrated the expanding possibilities of donor organ medicine.

Heart-lung transplantation intensified modern poetic attention to breath, pulse, dependency, and survival. Breath has always been central to poetry as metre, voice, and life-force; this operation made literal the idea that another person's organs could sustain the rhythm by which a human voice continues.