SUNDAY, DAY 7
MEDICAL MILESTONES
In the early 1900s, scientists were steadily searching for new ways to see into and manipulate the beating human heart. It was clear that more and more people were dying of cardiovascular disease, clogged arteries, and heart attacks, but it wasn’t until cardiac catheterization was put into use that doctors could see what was really going on inside a living person’s circulatory system.
One of the inventors of the technique was Werner Forssmann (1904–1979), who was a medical student in Germany when he decided to test the idea on the most readily available guinea pig: himself. In 1929, Forssmann took an x-ray of himself after slipping a long, thin, tube into his arm and sliding it up his vein. It turned out that he had pushed the catheter all the way into the right atrium of his heart. This opened the door to a whole new set of possibilities: Two years later, Forssmann performed the experiment again, this time injecting a liquid known to show on x-ray film—essentially performing the first angiocardiogram.
Building on these experiments, André Frédéric Cournand (1895–1988) and Dickinson Richards (1895–1973) continued studying cardiac catheterization on laboratory animals at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. They demonstrated that the procedure was safe—again, by testing it on Cournand himself—and used it in a clinical setting for the first time in 1941.
Cardiac catheterization allowed for a new way to study the heart and lungs by permitting doctors to draw blood directly from the heart. By attaching tiny devices to the catheter’s tip, doctors could also take blood pressure readings and measure oxygen and carbon dioxide levels as blood flowed through the body. For their discovery, Forssmann, Cournand, and Richards shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.