Werner Forssmann

Werner Forssmann was a German physician who, in 1929 while working at a hospital in Eberswalde, performed the first cardiac catheterization on a human being by threading a catheter through a vein in his own arm roughly sixty centimeters into his own heart, confirming the result with an x-ray image. The demonstration, undertaken against the objections of his supervising surgeon, showed that the heart could be safely accessed for diagnosis rather than being an organ too dangerous to approach directly, opening the way to modern cardiac catheterization. He shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Andre Cournand and Dickinson Richards, who went on to develop the clinical applications of the technique he had first shown was possible.