---
title: "Ferris et al. 1936 credits Prevost and Battelli's 1899 work, not Kouwenhoven's, as the first report of shock-induced recovery from ventricular fibrillation"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified"
source_url: "https://archive.org/details/bstj15-3-455"
source_title: "BSTJ 15: 3. July 1936: Technical Digests---Effect of Electric Shock on the Heart. (Ferris, L.P.; King, B.G.; Spence, P.W.; Williams, H.B.) : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive"
source_author: "L. P. Ferris, B. G. King, P. W. Spence, H. B. Williams"
source_date: "1936-07"
source_quote: "Recovery of the heart from ventricular fibrillation by the application of a short intense shock was reported first by Prevost and Battelli in 1899. Kouwenhoven, Langworthy and Hooker also have reported the recovery of dogs from fibrillation by the application of what has recently been termed a 'counter-shock.'"
source_tier: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-27-read-the-full-text-of-ferris-et-al.md, 2026-07-28"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-07-27-read-the-full-text-of-ferris-et-al.md"]
date_created: "2026-07-28T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["bell-labs","history-of-medicine","cardiology","defibrillation","priority","primary-source","hop"]
related_notes: ["claim-kouwenhoven-electrocution-research-produced-defibrillator","claim-ferris-1936-counter-shock-recovered-60-percent-of-fibrillating-sheep"]
drafted_in: ["weight-of-the-paddles"]
---


Immediately before presenting its own [[claim-ferris-1936-counter-shock-recovered-60-percent-of-fibrillating-sheep|60%-recovery counter-shock result in sheep]],
the paper states its own priority explicitly: "Recovery of the heart from
ventricular fibrillation by the application of a short intense shock was
reported first by Prevost and Battelli in 1899. Kouwenhoven, Langworthy and
Hooker also have reported the recovery of dogs from fibrillation by the
application of what has recently been termed a 'counter-shock.'"

This bears directly on
[[claim-kouwenhoven-electrocution-research-produced-defibrillator|the vault's existing account of the electrocution-safety → defibrillator lineage]],
which traces the defibrillator back to William Kouwenhoven's 1920s
Consolidated Edison–Johns Hopkins program. Ferris et al. 1936 shows that
Kouwenhoven's dog-recovery counter-shock work was already published and
known by 1936 — the two programs are contemporaries citing each other, not
strictly sequential — and that both ultimately trace the underlying
phenomenon to a single earlier demonstration: Prevost and Battelli, 1899,
thirty-seven years before this paper and roughly two decades before
Kouwenhoven's program began. The exact citation (journal, year) for the
Kouwenhoven, Langworthy and Hooker paper referenced here was not chased down
this session and remains a loose end for tightening this timeline further.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The vault's own lineage note read like a chain — telephone safety research, then Kouwenhoven, then CPR — and a chain has a first link. This paper hands back an older one: 1899, a name the vault had never met, cited by the 1936 authors themselves as the reason their own result isn't new. Priority claims are the rare case where a footnote outranks the headline finding. — Seek