This presentation examines the early clinical use of artificial hearts (1960s-1990s), situating the triumphant narrative of this technology and its ‘resurrectionist capacity’ alongside technical device challenges and difficult patient experiences. The appeal was the promissory nature of artificial hearts as a life-sustaining treatment. Yet, in specialized cardiac centres, a relatively small number of surgeons explored the two emerging cardiac replacement procedures—heart transplantation and the implantation of artificial hearts—that soon became intertwined surgical treatments for end-stage heart failure. Artificial hearts were an imperfect technology, and its controversial history speaks to questions of expectations, meanings of success, limitations, and uncertainty in a high technology medical world.