Highlights of Heart Repair
Self-cardiac catheterization, balloons, stents and more, through the decades.
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 Courtesy of the Provident Foundation |
1893African-American surgeon Daniel Hale Williams sews up a tear in the pericardium of a man stabbed in a bar fight. |
 Courtesy of angioplasty.org |
1929German surgical resident Werner Forssmann performs the first cardiac catheterization— on himself. |
 LifeArt |
1938At Children’s Hospital in Boston, Robert Gross corrects a congenital heart defect in a seven-year-old girl. |
 Reprinted from “The Mid-Century Revolution in Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery: Part 4,” by A.P. Naef, Interactive Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery, 2004; 3:213-221, 2004 European Association of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery |
1952Charles Hufnagel of Georgetown University Medical Center implants the first prosthetic aortic valve. |
 © 1991 University of Pennsylvania Press |
1953Heart-lung machine inventor John Gibbon performs the first successful open-heart surgery with the device. |
 Courtesy of Cleveland Clinic Archives |
1958At the Cleveland Clinic, Mason Sones Jr. conducts the first coronary angiogram; it becomes the gold standard in diagnosis. |
 Courtesy of angioplasty.org |
1977Using a balloon catheter he made in his kitchen, Swiss cardiologist Andreas Gruentzig performs the first angioplasty. |
 Courtesy of Cordis |
1986Stents, designed to hold arteries open longer, are introduced to angioplasty in France. They receive FDA approval in 1994. |
 Courtesy of James L. Cox |
1987James L. Cox of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis develops the Cox-Maze procedure for atrial fibrillation. |
 Courtesy of Ottavio Alfieri |
1994Italian surgeon Ottavio Alfieri devises the Alfieri stitch, which connects a mitral valve’s flaps but still allows blood flow. |
 P. Marazzi/Photo Researchers, Inc. |
1998French electro-physiologists discover that the major triggers of atrial fibrillation are in the pulmonary veins. |
 Courtesy of Evalve, Inc. |
2003The MitraClip, the first percutaneous device for performing the Alfieri stitch, enters feasibility trials in the United States. |
