- What assassination motivated Alexis Carrel to pursue the problem of vascular surgery?
- What was Carrel's triangulation method for suturing severed blood vessels back together?
- How does Carrel's end-to-end vessel-joining technique underlie modern coronary bypass surgery?
Cardiology and Cardiac Medicine
The study and treatment of heart disease.
- How did Willem Einthoven's string galvanometer detect the tiny electrical currents produced by a heartbeat?
- What do the P, Q, R, S, and T waves on an electrocardiogram actually represent?
- Why was the original ECG apparatus so impractical, and how did the technology change afterward?
- How does an ECG let a doctor distinguish a straining heart from a heart in early infarction?
- How did cardiac catheterization let physicians measure pressures inside a living heart for the first time?
- Who were the first subjects of Cournand's catheterization experiments?
- Why did Werner Forssmann perform cardiac catheterization on himself rather than a patient in 1929?
- What happened to Forssmann's career after his self-experiment became known?
- How did Cournand and Richards turn Forssmann's dangerous stunt into a precise clinical technique over the following decade?
- What modern cardiac procedures trace their lineage back to Forssmann's original catheter?
- What controversy surrounded Denton Cooley's 1969 artificial heart implantation?
- What did Furchgott discover about the role of endothelial cells in relaxing blood vessel walls?
- What modern treatments trace their origin to understanding nitric oxide's role in the cardiovascular system?
- Why had nitroglycerin been used to treat angina for over a century before anyone understood the mechanism?
- How does nitric oxide, a small reactive gas, function as a signalling molecule that relaxes blood vessels?
- What mechanisms did the researchers propose, and decline to fully claim, for why music might affect cardiac tissue?
- What does the finding suggest about the physiological, rather than metaphorical, nature of romantic attraction?
- How widespread are microRNAs across multicellular life, and what diseases have they been implicated in?