The Life of Russell Marion Nelson: Part I-Changing Hearts
On January 14, 2018, Russell Marion Nelson was sustained by the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles as the 17th President and Prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. His ascension as the senior apostle upon the Earth took thirty-four years since his ordination to the apostleship, which occured on April 7, 1984. Since that faithful date thirty-five years ago, President Nelson has visited 133 countries and territories, spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ and all that it entails. As this magnificent man has already been examined, the purpose of this article will be to share private experiences from his life, showing his life from beginning to end through other sources and mediums.
““I also owe much to my forebears. All eight of my great-grandparents were converts to the Church in Europe. Each of these stalwart souls sacrificed everything to come to Zion. During subsequent generations, however, not all my ancestors remained so committed. As a result, I was not raised in a gospel-centered home.
I adored my parents. They meant the world to me and taught me crucial lessons. I cannot thank them enough for the happy homelife they created for me and my siblings. And yet, even as a boy, I knew I was missing something. One day I jumped on the streetcar and went to an LDS bookstore to find a book about the Church. I loved learning about the gospel.
As I came to understand the Word of Wisdom, I wanted my parents to live that law. So, one day when I was very young, I went to our basement and smashed on the concrete floor every bottle of liquor! I expected my father to punish me, but he never said a word.
As I matured and began to understand the magnificence of Heavenly Father’s plan, I often said to myself, ‘I don’t want one more Christmas present! I just want to be sealed to my parents.’ That longed-for event did not happen until my parents were past 80, and then it did happen. I cannot fully express the joy that I felt that day, and each day I feel that joy of their sealing and my being sealed to them.””
“My father wanted me to go into his line of work, advertising. I started working for him and his firm when I was 10. The most motivating thing for me was Christmas time while working at a post office sorting mail. It was a dreadfully dull job and I kept looking at the clock wondering when my time was going to be up and I thought, ‘I better get an education.’ In high school I discovered I loved biology and math, and I loved people. I told Mom and Dad, ‘I don’t want to disappoint you, but I want to be a doctor.’ They said, ‘We’ll be glad to help you. We’ll support you any way we can.’
I kind of drifted into surgery because of Emil G. Holmstrom, M.D., an obstetrics and gynecology professor who had been recruited to the U. from the University of Minnesota Medical School. He suggested I do an internship and residency in Minnesota; he said he could get me an interview. It was the unknown. I went into surgery because I thought it would be a challenge. I liked, not only the discipline of medicine, but the opportunity to get in and do something about it, which a surgeon can do. And I went into cardiac work because no one knew anything about it.””
“In 1945, while I was in medical school, I married Dantzel White in the Salt Lake Temple. She and I were blessed with nine splendid daughters and one precious son. Today our ever-growing family is one of the greatest joys of my life.”
“ As many of you know, President Nelson was a world-renowned heart surgeon and, early in his medical career, a pioneer developer of the heart-lung machine. He was on the research team that supported the first open-heart operation on a human being, in 1951, using a heart-lung bypass. President Nelson performed a heart operation on President Spencer W. Kimball not long before President Kimball became the prophet.
”
“In medical school the textbooks said, “You never touch the human heart, because if you do, it’ll stop beating.” That’s how very little we knew about the heart in 1947. It was against that backdrop that I started doing research on the heart in Minnesota. One thing led to another. We started work on the heart-lung machine. I was part of the team that did the very first open heart operation employing extracorporeal circulation in March 1951. It was a turning point in the history of surgery, because it went from a question of whether you can open the human heart and have the patient survive to, what is possible now that you can get in there.
I was operating at LDS, but was director of the thoracic surgery program for the U. for 17 years. It proved to be a nice blend, because [at LDS] I had the patients who were coming to me for cardiac surgery, while the U. had a smaller service, but some complicated cases. We went from those early experiments on whether or not the heart would allow you to touch it to sodium ratio perfusions so we could turn the heart on and off. Every basic step was hard. I only operated on about one patient a month because we would find so many surprises with each operation. We’d have to go back to the lab. It took us a year to figure out how to get blood out of the body and have it stay liquid and have it return to the body and be able to clot again. There were pains and heartache and tears along the way. But before we were through we could literally say heart surgery was a lot safer than abdominal surgery.”
