The first use on a human was in 1947 by Claude Beck, professor of surgery at Case Western Reserve University. Beck's theory was that ventricular fibrillation often occurred in hearts that were fundamentally healthy, in his terms "Hearts that are too good to die", and that there must be a way of saving them. Beck first used the technique successfully on a 14-year-old boy who was being operated on for a congenital chest defect. The boy's chest was surgically opened, and manual cardiac massage was undertaken for 45 minutes until the arrival of the defibrillator. Beck used internal paddles on either side of the heart, along with procainamide, an antiarrhythmic drug, and achieved return of a perfusing cardiac rhythm.