Edwin Tutt Long MD

Edwin was born on July 23, 1925 in St. Louis, MO, to Hazel Tutt Long and Forrest Edwin Long.

He spent his early days in the St Louis area, where his father was a professor at Washington University. After his parents divorced in 1936, he spent the school year in Missouri with his mother while she finished her master’s degree at the University of Missouri and then taught history at William Woods College in Fulton. During that time, he spent his summers in New York, where his father had moved to be a professor of education at New York University.

Edwin loved learning and skipped two years to graduate high school before he was 15 years old. He attended Columbia University in New York City and then went on to pursue a medical degree from Columbia on an army scholarship and specialized in cardiovascular and thoracic surgery. According to family lore, after an uncomfortable procedure on his ears at the age of six, Ed declared that he was going to be a doctor who would not make anyone’s ears hurt.

During the Korean War, Ed was an Air Force officer and served stateside as surgeon at a flight training center. While completing his surgical residency at the University of Chicago Hospital, he met and fell in love with Mary Hull, a nurse on the cardiac unit. Ed and Mary were married in 1955 and had three children between 1959-1962. Early in his career, Ed studied open heart surgery procedures with noted cardiac surgeon, Denton Cooley, and then went on to practice cardiovascular and thoracic surgery at the Watson Clinic in Florida where he implanted Medtronic’s very first internal pacemaker (serial no. 001), which he later donated to Medtronic, Inc for their historical archives. Ed loved research and invented several surgical tools himself over the course of his career.

In 1970, Ed took a surgical teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Several years later, the family moved to Pittsburgh where he practiced surgery until he retired in 1988 and moved back to his home state of Missouri with his wife Mary.

Ed loved his chosen career and he adored his wife and children. He was a wonderful father and an enthusiastic sailor and camper who planned numerous outings with (sometimes) less-than-enthusiastic family members. His warning system when anyone acted up in the car was ‘Condition Red!’. Once ‘Condition Red’ was called, things generally quieted down quickly.

Ed is survived by his children, Jennifer Long Berko, Laura Long Aractingi and Peter Edwin Long, two son-in-laws, a daughter-in-law, seven grandchildren, several cousins, nieces and nephews and numerous friends and colleagues. His beloved wife, Mary, passed away in 2017.

Over the past three years Ed received the love and support of an amazing care team and the family wishes to express their deep appreciation to each of them and the many other wonderful folks who enriched his life.

Anyone wishing to make a memorial gift in Ed’s honor are encouraged to donate to the National Kidney Foundation or the Parkinson’s Foundation.