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December 8, 2006

Fiftieth anniversary of Forssmann's Nobel prize: self-experimentation led to first heart catheter

The famous German doctor Ferdinand Sauerbruch at first delivered a crushing judgement: "You certainly can't begin surgery in that manner" and threw Werner Forssmann out of Berliner Charité hospital.

The young doctor had just told him about how he carried out an experiment on himself at Eberswalder Hospital to "probe the right atrium of the heart," a procedure known today as cardiac catheterization.

The German surgeon and urologist Dr. Werner Forssmann with his wife Elisabeth, at his clinic in Bad Kreuznach, Rhineland-Palatinate state.

Sauerbruch would prove to be wrong: on December 10, 1956 - 50 years ago - Forssmann received the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his pioneering work, along with two Americans.

Without Forssmann's self-experimentation in 1929 and the research building upon his discovery carried out by the American scientists, modern heart diagnostics and therapy would have had to do without a tool now deemed indispensable.

At 25, Forssmann had shown on his own body that a catheter could be inserted through a vein into the heart, without endangering the patient.

The procedure took place secretly in "complicity" with an operating room nurse, because Eberswalder's head clinician had forbidden such experiments.

"In no time at all I had anaesthetized the crook of my elbow and waited for the numbness. I quickly made an incision into the skin, shoved a 30-centimetre-wide catheter deep inside, packed gauze on it and wrapped a sterile dressing around it. Watching on an X-ray screen I shoved the tip of the probe into the atrium, exactly as I'd imagined it. For documentary evidence I had X-rays taken," Forssmann related.

The head clinician recognized that he had "discovered something wonderful." With the examination method Forssmann had developed, heart defects and diseases, particularly congenital deformities, could be detected inside the body.

The Eberswalder head clinician created an unpaid position for Forssmann with Sauerbruch at the Berliner Charité hospital. However, after the publication of the results of his self-experimentation in a medical journal, Forssmann had to go look for a job elsewhere. The Nobel Prize in 1956 came as a total surprise. Forssmann died on June 1, 1979 in Schopfheim, Baden-Württemberg.

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