TIL the first man to perform cardiac catheterization, did it on himself then walked downstairs to the radiology department to take the x-ray to prove you would not die. He was fired, became a Nazi, then won the Nobel Prize.
From 1932 to 1945, he was a member of the Nazi Party. At the start of World War II, he became a medical officer. In the course of his service, he rose to the rank of Major, until he was captured and put into a U.S. POW camp. Upon his release in 1945, he worked as a lumberjack
From Nazi surgeon to lumberjack, that’s quite a career change.
In 1929, while working in Eberswalde, he performed the first human cardiac catheterisation. He ignored his department chief and persuaded the operating-room nurse in charge of the sterile supplies, Gerda Ditzen, to assist him. She agreed, but only on the promise that he would do it on her rather than on himself. However, Forssmann tricked her by restraining her to the operating table and pretending to locally anaesthetise and cut her arm whilst actually doing it on himself.
wat
The German medical community considered Forssmann’s theory and experiment to be nothing more than a circus stunt and they effectively refused to give his work credibility. It wasn’t until two doctors at Columbia University, Andre F. Cournand and Dickinson W. Richards, Jr., studied his experiment and developed ways to use it for both research and diagnosis that it received proper acclaim. The Nobel prize was shared between Forssman, Cournand, and Richards Jr.
“No one in West Germany has paid any attention to me. The Americans were the ones who recognized my work,” said Forssman. “It is a very satisfying feeling to know that my research was right.” (New York Times, October 19, 1956.)
“Hey look, I put a thing in my heart”
“I told you not to put the thing in your heart. Fuck you. You’re fired”
“Fuck me? Fuck you. I’m gonna go join the Nazis and put tubes wherever the fuck I want.”
This might possibly be the best thread title I’ve seen on reddit.
Although not mentioned in the wikipedia page, he did this as a resident.
He was fired, became a Nazi, then won the Nobel Prize.
Well that escalated quickly.
That title was a fucking ride.
Forssmann won the Nobel Prize almost 30 years after his self-experimentation in 1929, and it caught him off guard.
In October 1956 a provincial German physician named Werner Forssmann received a telephone call from Stockholm, Sweden notifying him that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Reportedly, his puzzled response was: “For what?”
Forssmann’s puzzlement was understandable. His early feat in 1929 of performing the first catheterization of a living human heart—his own—had been greeted with a mixture of hostility and indifference by his medical colleagues in Germany. As a result, he abandoned his pioneering work early on and became a urologist.
In spite of his discovery, he was seen as a theatrical attention-seeker in Germany. After the war, his reputation was further tarnished by the fact he had been a member of the Nazi Party.
His work was studied by Americans during his time in a POW camp, who realized how tremendous a discovery Forssmann had made after they read his paper- it’s through these channels that his technique was recognized.
Since the end of WWII he’d worked as an ordinary physician in Bad Kreuznach, a small city in southwestern Germany. He described his professional life as “the slave labor of a health insurance doctor.”
That’s a super casual “became a Nazi…”
As a guy who has had 3 catheter ablations, that’s pretty good of him to take one for the team.
But he did die of heart failure… in 1979.
Medical question: how do they “steer” the probe or catheter or whatever? How does the catheter thingy knows which way to go and it doesn’t end going up into his brain?
Once you thread a tube from your arm into your heart, the only thing left is to hate Jews and win the Nobel prize. I asked my grandfather what he thought of Werner Forssmann and we came to the same conclusion, that if I slipped some whiskey into his IV, he promised not to tell anybody at the nursing home.
Man, the title sounds like a thread from /r/SubredditSimulator.
Sounds like an episode of The Knick.
Very good show if you haven’t seen it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08V4RHGuGqE
Well, you could say his heart was in the reich place…
Sounds like the Nazi scientists from comic books:
“Zey said ze experiment vas ‘unethical’ so I shall carry out ze procedure on myself. Hail Hydra!”
He was fired, became a Nazi, then won the Nobel Prize.
What a goddamn crazy life, man.