Word: forssmann
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DIED. Werner Forssmann, 74, Nobel-prize-winning German surgeon; of a heart attack; in Schopfheim, West Germany. Forssmann's 1956 prize recognized a feat he had performed 27 years earlier as an intern: defying a then prevalent medical taboo against tampering with the living heart, he threaded a thin tube through the vein of his left arm until it reached his right ventricle. The catheterization technique he thus pioneered became a standard tool in treating cardiac problems...
Some U.S. physicians asked last week whether the flurry of surgical virtuosity in heart transplants might be premature. A Canadian heart surgeon said it was. The Soviet Union's health ministry forbade Russian surgeons to do such transplants. Germany's Dr. Werner Forssmann, who won a Nobel Prize for dangerously daring heart research performed on himself, said: "I consider it a crime to perform an operation in a field where fundamental research is not yet finished...
...Werner Forssmann was young (25) and eager to prove the worth of a revolutionary idea: that it should be possible to learn more about the inside of a diseased human heart by inserting a thin rubber tube (catheter) into it. But none of his hospital colleagues in Eberswalde, near Berlin, was willing to be a guinea pig. Suspecting the gleam in young Forssmann's eyes, the chief surgeon even forbade his experimenting on himself. Secretly one night Dr. Forssmann punctured a vein in his arm and persuaded a fellow resident to start working a tube into it. With little...
With the tube in place, Dr. Forssmann climbed two flights of stairs to the X-ray room, and persuaded the radiologist to take a picture as photographic proof that its tip had entered the right side of his heart. The technique, he reported in a learned paper in 1929, would be valuable for studying the blood pressure inside the heart, and for injecting radiopaque dyes to get X rays of the heart, including abnormalities. But his discovery was ignored in Germany. Older men, who should have been wiser, scoffed at Forssmann's catheterization of the heart as a circus...
Driven from research by the skepticism of his German colleagues, Dr. Forssmann took up surgery. He was captured during the war. Since his release from an Allied P.O.W. camp in 1945, and a stint as a lumberjack, he has been supporting his wife and six children as a general practitioner in the little town of Bad Kreuznach in Rhine province. Last week he learned that Stockholm's Caroline Medico-Surgical Institute, only 27 years behind the times, had named him, together with Richards and Cournand, to share the 1956 Nobel Prize for medicine ($38,633). Said the German country...