A man after his own heart

In 1929, at the age of 25, a young man named Werner Forssmann had just got in to medical school at the University of Berlin, when he came up with a revolutionary new procedure for treating heart complaints. Inspired by sketches of the heart and circulatory system, he realised that a thin tube, called a catheter, could potentially be threaded directly into someone’s heart from a blood vessel in their arm. If successful, this would have ground-breaking implications.

Later that very year, Werner decided to attempt his daring new procedure. Despite being told not to perform the experiment by his boss, he convinced a nurse, Gerda Ditzen, to secretly assist him.

Gerda agreed on the condition that he would try out his new technique on her, and not on himself. But Werner tricked Gerda, anaesthetising her arm and making only a small cut. Before she realised that she had been duped, he had already numbed and inserted a catheter into his own arm, threading the catheter most of the way to his heart.

Gerda must have come around to the idea of Werner’s plan pretty quickly because she helped him walk the long way to the X-ray department with the catheter still hanging from his arm. Once there, Werner threaded the entire catheter the rest of the way into his heart, a staggering sixty centimetres in total. Taking pictures with an x-ray, he managed to show the catheter resting in the right top chamber (the atrium) of his heart and proved his theory was right.

A catheter can be carefully threaded up the arm and directly into the heart

Blood, sweat and tears

Once the head doctor got over his anger at Werner’s antics, he eventually recognised the significance of what had been done. Werner was allowed to treat a terminally ill woman with his new technique — giving her drugs using his new method.

Despite his stellar start, Werner was hired, fired, hired again and fired again over his career as a cardiologist and he eventually became an urologist instead, perhaps due to his love of catheters. For a time he proved to be a lot more successful in this field, but this was the late thirties and war was on the horizon. During World War II he was captured and held at an American prisoner-of-war camp for many years before being released and deciding to retire to a quiet life, working as a lumberjack and medic in the Black Forest.

Little did he know that during this time, the paper on his procedure was discovered by two doctors — Andre Frederic Cournand and Dickinson W. Richards. They realised the importance of Werner’s technique and its potential to improve heart disease diagnosis and research, and went on to develop it further. Twenty-seven years after performing his procedure for the first time, Werner eventually won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine alongside Cournand and Richards. So after a remarkable and strange life, Werner’s crazy idea eventually became a vital tool to fight heart disease. Doctors now use it to deliver drugs to the heart, find blockages in blood vessels, take samples from inside the body and help in diagnosis and larger operations.

Just what the doctor ordered

Werner Forssmann wasn’t afraid to try out new ways of working to help the millions of people suffering from heart and circulatory diseases and BHF-funded researchers are no different. Their bold ideas have pushed the boundaries of medicine to solve some of the greatest problems in heart health today. BHF Professors have developed many ground-breaking ways to help beat heartbreak forever.