Discovery of Cardiac Catheterization

German surgeon Werner Forssmann performed the first cardiac catheterization on himself in 1929 while working at a hospital in Eberswalde, anesthetizing his own arm, threading a urinary catheter roughly 60 centimeters through a vein into his own heart, and then walking to the hospital's radiology department to confirm with an X-ray that the catheter tip had reached his right atrium. Forssmann had reasoned that a catheter could be safely passed into the heart to deliver drugs, inject imaging dye or measure pressure directly, a suggestion his colleagues, including his own department chief, dismissed as reckless; the experiment ended his career in cardiac research for years and pushed him toward urology instead. The technique's diagnostic value was later established by French-American physician Andre Cournand and American physiologist Dickinson Richards, who developed methods for using cardiac catheterization to measure heart function and diagnose heart disease, and the three men shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the work, decades after Forssmann's original self-experiment.