Status Updates From Heart: A History

Gruentzig invented the balloon catheter over decades and successful operation got him worldwide recognition

Dotter wasn’t thinking of follow in effects and pushed blockages down to smaller arteries causing heart attacks

Forssmann stuck so many catheters up his veins they were all too scarred to use again. Dude was not right in the head even if he proved the point.

NIH used to be incomprehensibly small. Can scale up again.
“More than 600,000 Americans were dying of heart disease every year. In 1945, the budget for medical research at the National Institutes of Health was $180,000. Five years later, it was $46 million.”

Lillehei reportedly said, You don't venture into a wilderness expecting to find a paved road."

1- a small heart

Part 1- Metaphor. This is the section where a major concept of the perception of the heart has influenced how we think of it scientifically

Prologue discusses an Indian man with a history of cardiological issues. Upon receiving multiple opinions, he was diagnosed with multiple obstructions causing a 30%-50% blockages.

First heart-lung “machine” was actually dogs hooked up such that you stopped the heart of one and pumped blood from the other.
Holy fuck

“His echocardiogram showed vegetations—cheesy specks of infectious material—on both mitral leaflets, flapping around like flags in the wind. The bottom leaflet had been partially eaten away, leaving a gap through which blood was leaking back into the left atrium and farther back into the lungs, filling the air sacs with fluid, slowly drowning him.”

First heart surgeries, 1897!

Ready to forget the Islamic world of the 1200s and 1400s was very educated and worldly