Medicine: Into the Heart

Dr. 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 more than i ft. inserted, the friend quit, protesting that it was too dangerous. A week later, with no helper other than a nurse holding a mirror so that he could watch the tube’s progress on a fluoroscope, Forssmann tried again and got 25½-inches of tube through his elbow vein.

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 stunt. Beginning in the early ’30s two Columbia University researchers, Dr. Dickinson W. Richards and French-born Dr. Andre Cournand, read of Forssmann’s experiment and developed a way to use it both for research and diagnosis. They showed that it could be used in studies of shock, in revealing defects inside the heart or abnormal connections between arteries. Conditions that formerly were invariably fatal could be detected and corrected by surgery.

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 doctor: “I feel like a village pastor who is suddenly informed that he has been made a cardinal.”