Historical Heart Surgery

The first successful surgery on the heart itself, performed without any complications, was by Dr. Ludwig Rehn of Frankfurt, Germany, who repaired a stab wound to the right ventricle on September 7, 1896.

Surgery on great vessels (aortic coarctation repair, Blalock-Taussig shunt creation, closure of patent ductus arteriosus), became common after the turn of the century and falls in the domain of cardiac surgery, but technically cannot be considered heart surgery.

[edit] Heart Malformations – Early Approaches

In 1925 operations on the valves of the heart were unknown. Henry Souttar operated successfully on a young woman with mitral stenosis. He made an opening in the appendage of the left atrium and inserted a finger into this chamber in order to palpate and explore the damaged mitral valve. The patient survived for several years[2] but Souttar’s physician colleagues at that time decided the procedure was not justified and he could not continue[3][4].

After the War things were different. In 1948 four surgeons carried out successful operations for mitral stenosis resulting from rheumatic fever. Horace Smithy (1914-1948) of Charlotte, revived an operation due to Dr Elliott Cutler of the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital using a punch to remove a portion of the mitral valve. Charles Bailey (1910-1993) at the Hahnemann Hospital, Philadelphia, Dwight Harken in Boston and Russell Brock at Guy’s Hospital all adopted Souttar’s method.. All these men started work independently of each other, within a few months. This time Souttar’s technique was widely adopted although there were modifications[3][4].

In 1947 Thomas Holmes Sellors (1902-1987) of the Middlesex Hospital operated on a Fallot’s Tetralogy patient with pulmonary stenosis and successfully divided the stenosed pulmonary valve. In 1948, Russell Brock, probably unaware of Sellor’s work, used a specially designed dilator in three cases of pulmonary stenosis. Later in 1948 he designed a punch to resect the infundibular muscle stenosis which is often associated with Fallot’s Tetralogy. Many thousands of these “blind” operations were performed until the introduction of heart bypass made direct surgery on valves possible[3].

Click to expand...

Just as I give my father no points for sticking his finger into some guy's right ventricle in 1944 in a tent by lamplight and fishing out blindly a bit of shrapnel. If he hadn't tried it the guy would have died.

Click to expand...

ColoradoGuy said:

Army surgeon in WW II (and then Korea). Then he'd had enough of that and went into peds. Interesting guy.

Click to expand...

ColoradoGuy said:

No. Just as I give my father no points for sticking his finger into some guy's right ventricle in 1944 in a tent by lamplight and fishing out blindly a bit of shrapnel. If he hadn't tried it the guy would have died. Under those circumstances we try new and risky things.

Click to expand...