Cardiology began in the Renaissance period with the study of the heart’s role in oxygenating and distributing blood. Physicians developed means to monitor the heart and understand ailments. Surgical procedures became viable in the mid-20th century, with innovations such as the pacemaker, coronary artery bypass surgery, and heart transplant.
The history of cardiology begins in the Renaissance period, with the first accurate analysis of the role of the heart in oxygenating and distributing blood throughout the body. For three centuries afterward, physicians slowly developed the means to precisely monitor this vital organ and understand the ailments that could affect it. It wasn’t until the mid-20th century, though, that technology had advanced to the point where surgical procedures became a viable approach to repairing a damaged heart.
Many point to British physician William Harvey for the first real milestone in the history of cardiology in 1628, when he articulated the heart’s role in pumping blood through a complex system of veins and arteries. Until then, it was thought that each blood vessel had a natural pulsating rhythm and was not recycled. It took another 80 years for the first accurate description of the construction of the heart to be provided by the French biologist Raymond de Vieussens; for the first time it was possible to understand the anatomical mechanics of organs.
Over the next two centuries, much of the history of cardiology involved gaining a firmer understanding of heart health and the conditions that might arise. In the 18th century, doctors began monitoring blood pressure to measure the viability of the organ. In the early 18th century, doctors could monitor heartbeats with a stethoscope. The electrocardiograph (ECG or EKG) was invented soon after the turn of the 20th century, which allowed doctors to more closely analyze the heart’s overall performance via electrical impulses. The arterial blockage called arteriosclerosis was first observed about a decade later.
Before the 20th century, there were scattered surgical firsts in the history of cardiology. Most were attempts to repair seriously injured patients. In the 20th, a German doctor named Ludwig Rehn performed the first successful open heart surgery to repair a wound that ripped through a soldier’s heart. However, this type of surgery was not commonly attempted until 1896. American John Gibbons invented a so-called heart-lung machine that allowed a surgeon to keep the blood oxygenated and circulate to the patient during repair or transplant surgeries .
These repairs were mostly reactionary until the dawn of cardiac repair surgery in 1950, when American surgeon Charles Hufnagel successfully implanted an artificial aortal valve. Two years later, another pair of American surgeons used hypothermia to slow the heart of a patient who successfully repaired a hole in her heart. Innovations intensified with the pacemaker arriving in 1958. In 1967, the first coronary artery bypass surgery was performed, a procedure that is performed several million times every year in the 21st century. In the same year, South African doctor Christiaan Barnard performed the first successful heart transplant.
Scattered among these many landmark firsts in the history of cardiology are many others of note. Defibrillation was first performed on dogs in 1899. Humans didn’t benefit until 1947, when the machine was used to restore heart function to a young teenager with a heart defect. One of the most recent milestones occurred in 1982, when William DeVries, an American cardiologist, implanted the first heart made entirely of artificial tissue.
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