Werner Forssmann

Werner Theodor Otto Forssmann was a German physician and researcher, born in Berlin on 29 August 1904, who studied medicine at the University of Berlin and passed the State Examination in 1929. Working in Eberswalde that year, he performed the first human cardiac catheterization on himself, anesthetizing his arm, inserting a urinary catheter into an antecubital vein and advancing it 60 cm into his right ventricle under fluoroscopy, an act that put his life at risk. The experiment cost him his place at the Charite and he later turned to urology, working at hospitals in Berlin and Dresden and, after the war, as a country medic and then a urologist in Bad Kreuznach. His paper was later read by Andre Cournand and Dickinson Richards, who developed his technique for diagnosing heart disease, and he shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Medicine with them.