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Vladimir Demikhov: The Soviet Surgeon and His Bizarre Two-Headed Dogs

The Soviet Union was well known for its propaganda and the widespread claims of success (often exaggerated) the country was experiencing. The Iron Curtain had been drawn, separating the Eastern bloc Soviet countries from the rest of the world, and much of what Russia was doing and creating was a mystery to many other countries, including the US.

One piece of propaganda boasted of the fantastic advancements the Soviet Union was experiencing regarding science and medicine. The propaganda included a TIME magazine article, pictures, and videos of one surgeon and his two-headed subject.

At first, the footage and photos looked like the worst version of early attempts at photoshopping, but this was not the case. Vladimir Demikhov had created a two-headed dog that had not only survived the horrific process but could respond to stimuli, drank water, and move about the lab.

Vladimir Demikhov did create more than one two-headed dog that lived for up to several weeks. The two-headed dog experiments overshadowed Demikhov’s incredibly successful surgical career, resulting in his death in obscurity in the late 1990s. Who was Vladimir Demikhov, and what was up with the crazy two-headed dogs ?

Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov

Vladimir Demikhov was born on July 31, 1916, to a poor family of peasants in what is now known as the Novonikolayevsky district in Volgograd, Russia . His father was killed in the Russian Civil War, so his mother raised Vladimir, his brother, and his sister on her own.

She wanted her children to be well educated and ensured all three Demikhov children could attend good schools and colleges. As a teenager, Vladimir Demikhov became interested in the circulatory systems of mammals.

He wasn’t a psychopath; he found Ivan Pavlov’s theory of classical conditioning experience in dogs endlessly fascinating. His experiments may seem brutal but they were in pursuit of scientific understanding, not cruelty. Not that this offered any comfort to the dogs.

Vladimir Demikhov attended college at Voronezh State University in 1934, then transferred to Moscow State University, where he remained until graduating in 1940. While at Moscow State, Vladimir Demikhov experienced the first of many medical successes which changed the field of transplantology (a word Demikhov coined).

The first of Vladimir Demikhov’s creations was the world’s first artificial heart, and he performed the first artificial heart implantation into a dog. The dog lived two hours after the procedure, proving the viability of his approach.

From a scientific standpoint, the experiment was seen as a success. After taking a break from his experimentations to serve in World War II, Demikhov returned to Moscow State University and dove head-first (no pun intended) into his experimental research. 

A Scientist Above All

Most of Vladimir Demikhov’s contributions to science were not recognized when he was alive due to the controversial two-headed dog experiment, which destroyed his reputation. Vladimir Demikhov was however a pioneer, responsible for many of the first surgical procedures we find today.

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In 1946 he performed the first intrathoracic heterotopic heart transplant, which means he successfully performed a transplant of a heart into the chest cavity, which was unheard of at the time. 1946 was a big year for Vladimir Demikhov, and he also performed the first heart-lung transplant in a mammal.

These groundbreaking medical procedures continued, and Vladimir Demikhov was also responsible for the first liver transplant, and the first orthotopic heart transplant. The orthotopic transplant meant that a living heart was transplanted into another mammal in the correct position where the heart belonged. Before that surgery, all heart transplants were positioned in the neck of the receiver to connect the new organ with the veins of the neck. 

In 1952 Vladimir Demikhov performed the first mammary-coronary anastomosis, which involves creating a surgical connection between two body structures to carry fluid. An example of anastomosis we see today happens after a section of a person’s colon is removed due to cancer and is reconnected to restore the bowels’ regular movements. 

One year later, Vladimir Demikhov performed the first successful coronary artery bypass surgery. Between 1963 and 1965, he created the world’s first collection of living human organs available for surgical use or, simply put, the world’s first organ bank. 

Vladimir Demikhhov’s experiments were so significant because he would work with “live organs.” These organs would be kept alive with a hand pump, like how lung transplants are kept on a machine to keep them inflating and deflating before it enters the recipient’s body in today’s medicine.

Previously, people attempted to perform transplants or reconnect an organ placed into a hypothermic state to preserve it when outside the donor’s body. The live organs Vladimir Demikhov used were more successful in their ability to resume regular function in a new host body.

The animal used as the experiment subject could live for hours or days after the surgery. Then he performed the first head transplant in 1954. 

The Two-Headed Dog Experiments

Let’s address the dog thing right away. Vladimir Demikhov did not hate dogs or hunt them for his mad scientist experiments. Back then, and even today, Moscow has upwards of 50,000 stray dogs roaming the streets.

The dogs have learned how to board the Metro trains to travel from one location to another, and nobody minds the four-legged strangers. Neutering and spaying dogs wasn’t a common practice, and the stray dog population exploded in the city at an alarmingly fast rate.

As upsetting as it is, dogs were used extensively as scientific and medical subjects because so many were present and accessible. Many western countries continue to rely on animal testing to this day, although none apparently go down the “what if more heads?” route.

The two-headed dog experiment was not some sick attempt to create a breedable two-headed dog, nor was it created to make a monster or cause animal suffering. The two-headed dog experiments aimed to see if two living creatures could be connected to each other and survive using only one of the dog’s circulatory systems.

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This was a pioneering thought process, the precursor to such procedures today as human ears grown on the backs of mice, using their circulatory system until they are ready to be transplanted to their subject. Whether such approaches could even work was unknown to Demikhov, and it would seem that his scientific curiosity got the better of him.

The issue with these head transplant experiments was that these experiments had no real-life applications like all his previous transplant experiments on dogs. People needed organ transplants to sustain or prolong their lives. Nobody needed a head transplant, let alone a two-headed dog. Add to that the questionable ethical and moral issues, and this research was problematic at best. 

Vladimir Demikhov was not the first surgeon to attempt to create a two-headed dog. In 1908 French surgeon Dr. Alexis Carrel and his partner, Dr. Charles Guthrie, an American physiologist, performed the same experiment that Vladimir Demikhov would attempt forty years later.

The two men managed to create a two-headed dog that seemed like a successful operation, but the animals degraded rapidly and were euthanized after several hours of declining health. Vladimir Demikhov’s two-headed dog in the now infamous video was not the first one he attempted to create, rather the 23rd, 24th, or 25th time the experiment took place (records vary greatly concerning how many times the experiment was repeated, but the consensus was over 22 times). 

For the experiment recorded by the media, Vladimir Demikhov chose a smaller dog named Shavka and a large stray German Shepherd named Brodyaga (the Russian word for ‘tramp’). Brodyaga was to be the host dog, and Shavka was to be the secondary head and neck.

Shavka’s lower body was amputated but retained her own lungs and heart that remained connected until seconds before the transplant. Shavka’s head and two front legs were then attached with an incision on Brodyaga’s neck, and vascular reconstruction was performed to allow the heads to share a circulatory system.

The last step was securing the dogs at the vertebrae using plastic string. The procedure took three and a half hours from start to finish, and both heads could hear, see, smell, and swallow. Shavka was not attached to Brodyaga’s stomach in any way, so whatever she drank would pour out of her via an external tube. Shavka and Brodyaga survived four days and the cause of death was determined to be a vein in their shared neck which was damaged during the procedure. 

The longest living of Vladimir Demikhov’s two-headed dogs survived 38 (though some reports list 28 or 29 days) days in 1968. After it died, the bodies were taxidermied and gifted to The Museum of History of Medicine in Riga.

The dog was previously on tour in Germany from 2011-2013 but has returned to Riga, where you can see it on display today. Once the news of Vladimir Demikhov’s two-headed dog procedures spread globally, many doctors came to the Soviet Union to learn about the surgical techniques Vladimir Demikhov and other Soviet surgeons had developed.

American doctors came to learn from Demikhov, and by 1962, the general consensus of the U.S medical community was that the two-headed dogs were not nonsense but something that showed the promise of the success of live organ transplantation. Vladimir Demikhov died at 82 from an aneurysm on November 22, 1998, in obscurity on the outskirts of Moscow. 

Top Image: The last two headed dog transplant performed by Vladimir Demikhov in 1959 in east Germany. Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-61478-0004 / CC BY-SA 3.0 de .

By Lauren Dillon 

Stolf, N. 2017. History of Heart Transplantation: a Hard and Glorious Journey . The Brazilian Journal of Cardiovascular Surgery 32, 5. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5701108/

Matskeplishivili, S. 2017. Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov (1916-1998): A pioneer of transplantation ahead of his time, who lived out the end of his life as an unknown in poor circumstances . European Society of Cardiology. European Heart Journal 38, 46. Available at: https://academic.oup.com/eurheartj/article/38/46/3406/4706202

Konstantinov, I. 2009. At the Cutting Edge of the Impossible: A Tribute to Vladimir P. Demikhov . National Library of Medicine. Texas Heart Institute Journal 36,5. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2763473/

Lauren Dillon

Lauren Dillon is a freelance writer with experience working in museums, historical societies, and archives. She earned her Bachelor’s Degree in Russian & Eastern European Studies in 2017 from Florida State University. She went on to earn her Master’s Degree in Museum Studies in 2019 from the University of San Francisco. She loves history, true crime, mythology, and anything strange and unusual. Her academic background has inspired her to share the parts of history not in most textbooks. She enjoys playing the clarinet, taking ballet classes, textile art, and listening to an unhealthy amount of true crime podcasts. Read More

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A dog with two heads: How a Soviet doctor pioneered organ transplantation against the odds

"The son of a peasant, Demikhov initially trained as a mechanic and repairman before enrolling in the biology department at Moscow State University. Here he thrived."

On April 11, 1959 the Associated Press circulated a message from Moscow: Russian doctors had transplanted a puppy’s head to the neck of a German shepherd and the two-headed beast was in good health. However, the American public - surprised by the sensational news - had not yet seen the shocking images. Only later would the photos of the experiment become public.

The pictures (which are, fair to say, objectively repulsive) document the ground-breaking experiment of a Soviet scientist leading the way in organ transplantation. By the time the news of the operation hit America in 1959, the surgeon - Vladimir Demikhov, 43 at the time - had already been performing transplants on dogs for five years.

None of the previously operated dogs has lived for more than six days. Pirat (the Russian word for Pirate) - the German shepherd operated on April 11 - proved an exception, however. The two-headed dog lived for three weeks while reacting to stimuli around it!

"By the time the news of the operation hit America in 1959, the surgeon - Vladimir Demikhov, 43 at the time - had already been performing transplants on dogs for five years."

A heart for two hours

The son of a peasant, Demikhov initially trained as a mechanic and repairman before enrolling in the biology department at Moscow State University. Here he thrived.

Demikhov performed his first ground-breaking experiment less than two years into his studies. In 1937, he sent shockwaves through Russia’s medical community when he created an artificial heart and successfully implanted it into a dog. The dog lived for two hours after surgery, pushing the borders of organ transplantation, a science scarcely studied in 1937 but vital for today’s medical world.

Demikhov’s later and bolder experiments attracted attention from across the Atlantic, as well as from Europe. Scientists in the West mostly believed organ transplantation was not possible because the patient’s immune system would reject the new addition.

Likely, this general skepticism was the main reason why the work of an American professor at Washington University - Dr. Charles C. Guthrie - who performed an experiment similar to Demikhov’s in 1908, was not followed up by his American colleagues.

Everything changed though when news about Demikhov’s success reached the U.S. In the 1960s, American doctors traveled to the Soviet Union to learn about innovative techniques used by Soviet surgeons. One of the key innovations, later adopted by the U.S., Canada, and Japan, was the use of staples to compress veins and arteries during operations, which dramatically reduced surgery time.

By 1962, a consensus of the American medical community had shifted and U.S. doctors, who saw Demikhov at work, gradually warmed to the possibility of successfully transplanting human organs.

Concise obituary

In 1965 Demikhov attended a medical conference where he proposed the creation of a bank where human organs could be stored for the needs of surgeons. The futuristic proposal, unthinkable at the time, sparked much anger among Soviet academics who criticized Demikhov and demanded the closure of his laboratory.

This took a toll on his health, his wife later recalled, and despite the fact Demikhov remained a director at the Russian Health Ministry Republican Center for Human Reproduction, his research efforts in organ transplantation declined, and his international fame wilted.

The pioneering scientist died in a small apartment on the outskirts of Moscow in 1998 at the age of 82. The true value of his experiments, which were observed with suspicion by the Soviet medical elites, were acknowledged by the Russian state at the end of his life. Demikhov was awarded the Order for Services for the Fatherland in 1998, the year of his death. However, the countless lives subsequently saved by organ transplants are his real legacy.  

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How Vladimir Demikhov Actually Made A Two-Headed Dog

Table of Contents:

After transplanting a number of vital organs between dogs, his favorite experimental subjects, he aimed amid much controversy to see if he could take things further; he wanted to graft the head of one dog onto the body of another fully intact dog. Starting in 1954, Demikhov and his associates set about performing this surgery 23 times with varying degrees of success. The 24th time, in 1959, was not the most successful, but it was the most publicized, with an article and accompanying photos appearing in Life magazine. Demikhov chose two topics. one large straight German shepherd that Demikhov named Brodiaga in Russian, and a smaller dog named Shafka.

Has there ever been conjoined dogs?

A female pair of conjoined twins of the Lhasa Apso canine breed was subjected to tomographic and anatomical examinations. The twins had only one head and neck. The two ribcages were joined, extending to the umbilicus, with duplicated structures thereafter.

Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28940234/

Rodiaga would be the host dog, and schaefka would supply the secondary head and neck with shake his lower body amputated below the four legs keeping her own heart and lungs connected until the last minute before the transplant and a corresponding incision in brodiaga’s neck where schaefer’s upper body would attach the rest was mostly vascular reconstruction other than attaching the dogs’ vertebrae with plastic strings thanks to the team’s wealth of experience Unlike some of his other breakthroughs in the field of transplantology, this head transplant had no real-world applications, but it had very real implications for the dogs. As outrageous as this all sounds, a head transplant wasn’t even that radical for the 1950s; in 1908, French surgeon Dr. Alexis Carroll and his partner, American physiologist Dr. Charles Guthrie, attempted the same experiment. Their dual-headed canine initially showed p Canavero stated last year that they have a tight schedule, but the team in China says they are ready to go anyway.

Most of the medical community believes that a transplant of this kind is still science fiction fodder, but in the not-too-distant future, such a surgery may become a reality.

Q&A – 💬

❓ how did vladimir demikhov make a two-headed dog.

Vladimir Demikhov feeds the two-headed dog he created by grafting the head and two front legs of a puppy onto the back of the neck of a full-grown German shepherd . Starting in 1954, Demikhov and his associates set about performing this surgery 23 times, with varying degrees of success.

❓ What was the two-headed dog experiment and why?

The breakthrough creation of a two-headed dog In 1954, Demikhov successfully grafted the head of a smaller puppy onto a grown-up dog .

• He sewed dogs' circulatory systems together and connected their vertebrae with plastic strings.
• The puppy's head growled and snarled.
• It licked the hand which caressed it.

❓ What was the Soviet 2 headed dog experiment?

You're looking at the horror film-esque result of an early transplant procedure by Soviet scientist Vladimir Demikhov, and it's really more like a one-and-a-half dog—Demikhov successfully grafted the head and forelegs of a smaller dog, Shavka onto a bigger dog, Brodyaga. Both initially survived the procedure.

❓ Has there ever been a dog with 2 heads?

In 1968, Demikhov transplanted another puppy's head onto the neck of another dog .

• The creatures survived for 38 days.
• Its bodies were then stuffed and in 1988 given to Riga's Museum of History of Medicine.
• For the past two years, it has travelled around Germany for exhibitions.

References:

• “The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin” by Steven Lee Myers – Simon & Schuster UK, 2015
• “The Invention of the Modern Dog: Breed and Blood in Victorian Britain” by Michael Worboys, Julie-Marie Strange, Neil Pemberton – Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018
• “The Domestic Dog: Its Evolution, Behaviour and Interactions with People” by James Serpell, Priscilla Barrett – Cambridge University Press, 1995
• “Mason’s World Encyclopedia of Livestock Breeds and Breeding, 2 Volume Pack” by Valerie Porter, Lawrence Alderson, et. al. – CABI, 2016

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The history of the two-headed dog experiment

VLADIMIR DEMIKHOV WAS a pioneering surgeon.

Without his contributions to science and medicine, organ transplant and coronary surgery may not be as developed as it is today – a fact that is not well known because his papers were written in Russian while living on the bleaker side of the Cold War and through World War II.

Some of his peers noticed though.

Christiaan Neethling Barnard, the South African cardiac surgeon who performed the world’s first successful human-to-human heart transplant, said in 1997: “I have always maintained that if there is a father of heart and lung transplantation then Demikhov certainly deserves this title”.

Gazing back at Demikhov’s early experiments that led to many successes in the operation rooms, however, can offer an uncomfortable experience.

He was the first person to perform a successful coronary artery bypass operation on a warm-blooded creature but, yet, became more famous for his two-headed dog.

In fact, many of his  experiments were carried out on dogs. He transplanted lungs and hearts, took organs out to see how long dogs would survive and watched their reactions to the new organs.

By far the most unusual experiments and surgeries included the transplantation of the head or half the body. In 1948, he wrote about the “surgical combination of two animals with the creation of a single circulation”.

In this image, Demikhov shows photographers how he stitched the head and upper body of a two-month-old puppy onto the neck of a four-year-old mongrel Mukhtar.

The work was carried out in the reanimation lab of the A.A.Bogomolets Physiology Institute of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.

In 1968, Demikhov transplanted another puppy’s head onto the neck of another dog. The creatures survived for 38 days. Its bodies were then stuffed and in 1988 given to Riga’s Museum of History of Medicine.

For the past two years, it has travelled around Germany for exhibitions. It returned to Latvia earlier this week.

(Warning: Graphic images that some viewers may find too disturbing)

(YouTube Credit: RussianFootageCom )

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Vladimir Demikhov and the Two-Headed Dog Experiment

Last updated on March 7th, 2024 at 02:03 am

Frankenstein may have had a kindred spirit with Soviet scientist Vladimir Demikhov. 

In 1954, Demikhov successfully grafted the head of a smaller dog onto the neck of a larger one, essentially creating a two-headed dog. 

A few years later, in 1959,  LIFE  magazine visited Demikhov to document what would be the 24th of his creative experiments on canines.

The  LIFE  team reported in detail the gruesome operation. After Demikhov prepared the dogs for surgery, he carved down through the smaller one, Shavka’s, flesh to her vital organs. 

Next, he severed her spine. The magazine article then picks up with this description:

“Although the rest of the body had now been amputated, Shavka’s head and forepaws still retained and used the lungs and heart. Now began the third and most critical phase of the transplantation. The main blood vessels of Shavka’s head had to be connected perfectly with the corresponding vessels of the host dog. Demikhov severed the small dog’s arteries and, with a surgical stapling machine which is the Russian’s special invention, swiftly spliced them into the exposed vessels in Brodyaga’s neck. Shavka’s own heart and lungs were then cut away.”

This nightmarish process resulted in a dog with an extra head that could eat and swallow but little else. 

The head was not connected to the rest of the larger dog’s organs, so all the food that the extra head ingested had to be pumped through a tube and discarded. 

Demikhov had proven that he could turn two healthy dogs into one bizarre-looking dog with a virtual death sentence (the longest living of Demikhov’s dogs lasted one month). But why did he do it?

Hearts and Heads: Vladimir Demikhov’s Strange Experiments

Although Shavka and Brodyaga (the larger dog) only survived for four days, they fared better than many of their predecessors, who quickly died. Overall, Demikhov made at least 20 head grafts throughout his career. 

His work, however, began with hearts.

In 1946, Demikhov began adding an extra heart to dogs to see if it would continue pumping blood. 

Although these second hearts only lasted a few months, he considered the experiments a success. He then wanted to test how much of a dog’s body a single heart could sustain, essentially doing the opposite of the previous heart experiments. 

To that end, he began grafting whole front ends of dogs onto his experimental victims. Shavka and Brodyaga were part of those efforts.

The most successful of Demikhov’s head grafts was undoubtedly a German Shepard named Pirat, who lived for a whole month as host to a smaller dog’s head. 

Demikhov was happy to note that the passenger’s head acted independently of the German Shepherd host, occasionally biting and nibbling Pirat’s ear.

If you’re wondering whether Demikhov had a guilty conscience about what he was doing to his dog subjects, he makes it pretty clear that he lost no sleep over the experiments. 

He claimed that “The big dog doesn’t understand” and that “he feels some kind of inconvenience, but he doesn’t know what it is.” He even joked that Brodyaga was a lucky dog because “You know the saying: two heads are better than one.”

Clearly, Demikhov wasn’t too concerned about the plight of his test subjects. But he wasn’t just carrying out these experiments as a cruel joke. He genuinely wanted to make organ transplants more effective in order to help accident victims who rely on these risky operations. 

In this, Vladimir Demikhov may have indirectly saved the lives of innumerable transplant survivors.

Vladimir Demikhov May Have Been Ahead of His Time

Despite the macabre nature of his experiments, Demikhov had a very good reason for conducting them. His goal was to help advance the science of organ transplants. But, ultimately, he wanted to save lives.

Vladimir Demikhov’s creativity began early. In 1937, when still a student at the University of Moscow, he invented a machine that could act in place of a heart and keep the body sustained with blood for up to five hours.

 It may not sound like much, but in those decades, this was a significant step forward.

During World War II, Demikhov was called to serve as a pathologist in a field hospital. 

Part of his job included evaluating injured soldiers to determine the cause of their injuries. You see, it was not uncommon for soldiers to shoot themselves to escape the front lines and spend the war in a hospital. 

The punishment for being caught faking an injury, however, was death. Demikhov saved many lives by lying about the nature of many soldiers’ self-inflicted injuries.

After the war, Demikhov returned to his experiments. By 1946, he managed to perform the transplantation of a heart and both lungs, which had never been done before. 

But then, during the 1950s, the Ministry of Health looked into Demikhov’s experiments and decided they were unethical. 

That could have been the end of Demikhov’s research; however, his boss at the Moscow Institute of Surgery was the chief army surgeon and thus was able to sidestep the ministry’s directive.

Demikhov continued on, and in 1953 he had his first successful coronary bypass surgery. It gained little attention. His first canine head transplant, which he performed the following year, got people’s attention. 

When the media caught wind of Demikhov’s unusual experiments, he immediately became the target of journalists, activists, and other medical professionals. His work, besides being seen as cruel, has no apparent possible real-world application.

However, others did see value in what Vladimir Demikhov was doing. As unsavory as his work may seem, his experiments were an important step toward figuring out how to carry out human transplants. 

Many of the techniques that he pioneered on dogs during the years of the Cold War have now become standard practice in hospitals around the world.

In 1967, the South African doctor Christian Barnard was the first to carry out a human-to-human heart transplant successfully. 

Years later, he acknowledged a debt of gratitude to Demikhov, saying, “I have always maintained that if there is a father of heart and lung transplantation, then Demikhov certainly deserves this title.”

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