Every community has a hometown hero. Sometimes it’s a high school football star who makes it to the NFL, or a local actor who goes on to make it big in Hollywood. 

In Maple Lake, Dr. James Jude holds that honor. 

 

For those who don’t know, Dr. Jude was a co-developer of cardiopulmonary resuscitation, more commonly known as CPR. He was a cardiac and thoracic surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore when chance brought him in contact with Dr. William Kouwenhoven and Dr. Guy Knickerbocker who combined their research to discover the lifesaving technique. 

 

But before all of that, Dr. Jude was your average small-town boy who went to school (Maple Lake Class of 1946), likely played sports, and probably dreamed of making his mark on the world. Recently, a relative of Dr. Jude delivered an interesting package to the Maple Lake Library. It contained one of Dr. Jude’s senior class projects with dozens of pictures of Maple Lake from 1946. Town Historian Sue Sylvester said it’s the most extensive collection of a dated period she’s ever seen for this community. Inspired, Sylvester has since turned that collection into an archival display at the Maple Lake Library that everyone is invited to come in and see. 

 

Jude’s school project, which is protected in a glass case at the library, is a handcrafted, wooden photo album containing numerous black and white photographs taken, seemingly, from every angle of the town – there are even a couple that Sylvester suspects were taken from on top of St. Timothy Church.  A brief description inside the cover suggests Jude was looking to document the village by photographing “views of the town,” “places of interest,” and “some homes.” The date is recorded as April 1946. Dr. Jude was a senior and the project was for English XII, taught by Miss Hamm. 

Dr. Jude has since passed away, but in a Maple Lake Messenger article written by Theresa Andrus in 2011, he explains how Miss Hamm was the one who made him realize medicine was his calling. 

 

“I had a teacher in high school, a Miss Hamm,” he told Andrus. “She had us write about what we wanted to be and I wrote a dissertation on that I wanted to be a doctor. And I don’t know why. I suppose it was because we had a local doctor, Dr. (S.J.) Raetz, who impressed me. And there was another local doctor whose name I can’t remember. They were general practitioners and I always thought I’d practice in a small town like Maple Lake.” 

 

Despite his intentions to return home, life had other plans for Dr. Jude. He explains in the same article how his wife was from Baltimore, and it was there, at Johns Hopkins he would practice medicine and make his world changing discovery. 

Armed with a degree from the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul and another from the University of Minnesota School of Medicine he started his internship at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Dr. Jude remained at Johns Hopkins for his general, thoracic, and cardiac surgery residency in 1954 and served as Chief Surgical Resident from 1960 to 1961. 

 

During that time, he was doing research related to hypothermia and he developed a technique that could restart the heart by introducing hot blood into the aorta. According to an article at the National EMS Museum, Dr. Jude was conducting his experiments in a new laboratory just down the hallway from Dr. Kouwenhoven’s laboratory. Dr. Kouwenhoven and his graduate student, Dr. Knickerbocker, were working on developing an external defibrillator by applying electrodes to the chests of dogs. 

According to the Museum article, Dr. Jude was in the laboratory one Saturday when Dr. Knickerbocker shared how he observed a brief, temporary rise in blood pressure when the heavy copper electrodes were applied to the chest wall of a dog whose heart had stopped beating. Jude immediately recognized the significance of the observation. Together, the three men discovered that forceful, rhythmic pressure on the chest could cause enough blood to move through the body to sustain the vital organs in emergency situations. The first documented and successful case of their method being used on a human patient happened in July of 1959 when a 35-year-old woman being anesthetized for a gall bladder operation went into cardiac arrest. Dr. Jude, instead of using the standard technique of opening the chest and massaging the heart directly, applied rhythmic, manual pressure. The patient made a complete recovery.

According to the Messenger article, in 1960 the results of the studies were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and it was reported that 70 percent of patients receiving the procedure survived. 

 

In the early 1960s, Jude and Kouwenhoven traveled across the U.S. presenting their method of external cardiac massage, which was combined with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to create CPR. 

 

In 1962, Jude, Kouwenhoven and Knickerbocker received the Hektoen Gold Medal from the American Medical Association for their work. In 1963, the CPR technique was formally endorsed by the American Heart Association. 

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In 1962 Jude was named one of the “Ten Outstanding Young Men in America” by the Junior Chamber of Commerce (Jaycees). Also in 1962, he was named an Assistant Professor of Surgery at Johns Hopkins and in 1964 he became a full Professor of Surgery at the University of Miami and a Clinical Professor of Surgery at the University of Miami in 1971. 

 

In 1969, he was presented with the Award for Merit by the American Heart Association and in 1974 he received the Helen B. Taussig Award from the Maryland affiliate of the American Heart Association. In 2006 he was named as a Hopkins Scholar. In 2011, Dr. Jude and Knickerbocker received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Cardiac Resuscitation Science at the Resuscitation Science Symposium, which pointed to the thousands of lives throughout the world that have been saved through the use of CPR. 

Throughout it all, Jude remained a dedicated husband to wife Sallye. Together they had seven children and as of the year 2000, when he retired, he had 13 grandchildren. 

On July 28, 2015, at the age of 87, Dr. James Jude died in his Coral Gables Florida home. According to his son, the surgeon died from complications of a Parkinson’s-like neurological disorder stemming from a tick bite. 

 

Dr. Jude’s contribution to the world was great, and his contribution to preserving Maple Lakes history was also great, although on a smaller scale. 

 

Jude’s senior class assignment will remain on display at the Maple Lake Library throughout the year for visitors interested in seeing what the town looked like 78 years ago. Jude’s many pictures have been enlarged and labeled by block and lot number and there is a key to help decipher where exactly in the city they are located. Many of the pictures also include a caption describing what inhabits that location today.

 

The display is open during library hours, which are: Mondays 12-6 p.m.; Wednesdays 3-6 p.m.; Fridays 12-6 p.m. and Saturdays, 10 a.m. – 1 - p.m.