Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: cardiac surgery

  • Forgotten pioneers of pediatric cardiac surgery

    Jayant RadhakrishnanDarien, Illinois, United States Credit for pioneering heart surgery in children is primarily given to Robert Gross of Boston Children’s Hospital and Alfred Blalock at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. However, two Chicago surgeons who saved many lives with their innovations in the same era have been largely forgotten. In the first half of…

  • Patients without borders: Cardiac surgery, activism, and advocacy

    Annabelle SlingerlandLeiden, Netherlands In the 1970s, a “patients without borders” organization made it possible for people with severe heart disease to be flown to other countries for treatment that was unavailable in their home country. It was a decade after Christiaan Barnard had pioneered heart transplantation in South Africa, and although most patients did not…

  • Book review: A Time for All Things: The Life of Michael E. DeBakey by Craig Miller

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, UK In the latter half of the twentieth century, Michael DeBakey was a worldwide household name, a remarkable feat for a surgeon in the days before the cult of celebrity had become part of the cultural zeitgeist. Craig Miller, himself a distinguished vascular surgeon and medical historian, has written a superb scholarly and…

  • Adrian Kantrowitz: The IABA and the LVAD

    Philip R. LiebsonChicago, Illinois, United States I first met Dr. Adrian Kantrowitz at my fourth-year surgery oral examination. He was one of three interviewers, and although I was sure that I failed the exam, he assured me that I had done well. I next met him almost 10 years later when I was a junior…

  • Echocardiogram: The first ultrasound picture of the moving heart

    Göran WettrellSweden The developments in ultrasound and microwave technology during World War II stimulated further research in the early 1950s. Ultrasound had been predicted to be useful in visualizing the organs of the human body, and with the beginnings of cardiac surgery there arose a need for better preoperative diagnosis, especially for correcting mitral stenosis…