Francisco Romero (surgeon)

Francisco Romero was a Spanish physician who is credited as the first heart surgeon on record. In 1801 he performed an open pericardiostomy, cutting into the pericardium, the membrane around the heart, on a living patient to treat a pericardial effusion, and the patient survived. This is regarded as the first successful open heart surgery in history. A memoir of his, lost for a time and later found, says that he carried out at least two successful open pericardial drainages with no deaths. The same memoir records five open drainages of pleural effusions, all successful, although one patient died six months afterward. The sources available give no birth or death dates for him, so his life is known mainly through this surgical record and through a 1997 article on him in the Annals of Thoracic Surgery.