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Andre Cournand: Medical Trailblazer
| Article
# : |
12400 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1987 |
2,616 Words |
| Author
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Michael Woods
Michael Woods, a contributing editor for THE WORLD & I, has
received numerous science-writing awards. |
Almost everyone probably has some conception - a mental stereotype - of a medical scientist. In our imagination, we see him or her as an archetypal figure whose portrait combines reality and fantasy as readily as an artist combines oils on a palette. It is the portrait of a Renaissance figure. There is a towering intellect that commands a Nobel Prize and other recognition through a brilliant career as a researcher. There are the attributes of a great humanitarian and philosopher, someone deeply concerned about the impact of science on society who may spend idle hours translating philosophical works. The personality is rounded by a love of sport, art, literature, music, and close personal acquaintance with famous artists. This ideal scientist, of course, has made practical contributions that help millions of people around the world live longer and healthier.
Few scientists, past or present, fit these criteria more closely than Andre Frederic Cournand, the French-born American physician who helped make cardiac catheterization (see story on page 232) one of the most valuable diagnostic tools in medicine.
Andre Cournand, who reached age ninety-one on September 24, 1986, was a medical student in Paris in 1929 when Werner Forssmann, a 25-year-old German surgeon, threaded a urinary catheter (a long spaghetti-thin, flexible tube) through a vein into his own arm and up into his heart. Forssmann thus performed history's first cardiac catheterization. At that time, Cournand was completing his medical education begun at the Sorbonne in 1914 but was interrupted by service in World War I. He was preparing to write a thesis on an attempt to isolate a virus from the brains of patients dying of an inflammation of the brain and spinal cord called disseminated sclerosing encephalomyelitis. Cournand was not aware of Forssmann's feat. Indeed, it would be years before an associate, Dr. Dickinson W. Richards, would show him the scientific paper that chronicled the dramatic episode of self-experimentation.
Years of work by Cournand and Richards in studying heart and lung physiology and developing catheterization into a useful medical tool brought them the 1956 Nobel Prize for Medicine or physiology. Forssmann also was awarded a share of the prize for his initial demonstration of catheterization. Cournand shared the prize graciously with Richards but grudgingly with Forssmann. In a recent interview, Cournand and his wife, Dr. Beatrice Bishop Berle, remembered Forssmann as someone whose claim to a share of the prize was tenuous - someone whose boldness led to a single achievement but who failed to follow-up and conduct the studies necessary to
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