The History of Cardiac Surgery

From the beginning of cardiac surgery in 1896 until around 1950, only closed surgical procedures could be performed by introducing fingers or instruments blindly into the heart cavities. The most widespread and beneficial operation using this type of surgery was the closed mitral commissurotomy performed with the Tubbs dilatator. In the early 1950s, the clinical use of hypothermia and of the extracorporeal circulation was introduced and opened up the desire of every heart surgeon to perform his work under direct vision. It lasted till the beginning of the 1960s, when the less complex one-way bubble oxygenator built by Richard De Wall and Walton Lillehei came to the market making the heart-lung machine to a routine tool in open-heart surgery. Not only the field of surgical correction of congenital heart diseases opened up, but also acquired heart diseases like valvular heart diseases, ischemic heart diseases, arrhythmias, or diseases of the thoracic aorta could be treated surgically in a great majority.