Werner Forssmann (1904-1979) was a German physician who studied medicine in the University of Berlin.
He thought that a catheter could be inserted into the heart, for such applications as delivering drugs, injecting radiopaque dyes and/or doing pressure recordings from the cardiac chambers. The fear at that time was that such a procedure would be fatal.
In 1929, he performed the first human cardiac catheterisation on himself. With the assistance of an operating-room nurse, Gerda Ditzen he anesthetized his cubital fossa, and after a cutdown he inserted and advanced a urinary catheter in his anticubital vein. He and Gerda then walked to the X-ray department, a floor down, where he advanced the catheter under fluoroscopy into his heart. This was recorded on an x-ray film showing the tip of the catheter into his right atrium.
During WW II, he served as a medical officer and held into a U.S. POW camp. During his imprisonment, his paper was read by Andre F. Cournard and Dickinson W. Richards who developed ways of applying Forssman's technique to the diagnosis of heart diseases. In 1956, the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine was awarded to Cournard, Richards and Forssman.
