American College of Cardiology

 

1944	Alfred Blalock performed the first "blue-baby operation" for tetralogy of Fallot, a shunt procedure developed with Helen Taussig and Vivien Thomas.
1948	The National Heart Act was passed, establishing the National Heart Institute (now the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute) and supporting research and training.
1948	Under the direction of the National Heart Institute, the Framingham Heart Study was launched and began to identify the common factors or characteristics that contribute to cardiovascular disease.
1948	Dwight Harken and Charles Bailey independently reported surgical procedures to relieve mitral stenosis.
1949	The American College of Cardiology was established to provide continuing medical education for physicians specializing in the treatment of cardiovascular disease.
1953	John Gibbon, Jr., performed the first successful open heart operation using a heart-lung machine that he invented; the patient had an atrial septal defect.
1954	Inge Edler, with physicist C. Hellmuth Hertz, reported using ultrasound to image the beating heart in humans.
1956	André Frédéric Cournand, Werner Forssmann, and Dickinson W. Richards shared a Nobel Prize for their pioneering work in cardiac catheterization.
1958	F. Mason Sones, Jr., introduced selective coronary arteriography as a diagnostic tool.
1958	Henry T. Bahnson first resuscitated a patient, a two-year-old child in ventricular fibrillation, by external cardiac massage (now referred to as CPR), and closed-chest defibrillation.
1960	Dwight Harken performed the first successful aortic heart valve replacement.
1960	William Chardack, Andrew Gage, and Wilson Greatbatch reported the first successful surgical insertion of an implantable pacemaker.
1960	Richard Lower and Norman Shumway reported the first successful orthotropic cardiac transplantation in a canine.
1960	William B. Kouwenhoven, C. Guy Knickerbocker, and James R. Jude published a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association on the successful use of external cardiac massage (CPR), as a method to restart the heart.
1961	The Framingham Heart Study found that high cholesterol levels increase the risk of heart disease.
1962	Hughes Day opened the first coronary care unit, an 11-bed unit at the Bethany Medical Center, in Kansas.
1965	The Surgeon General’s warning, "Caution: Cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health," was added to cigarette packages.
1966	Melvin P. Judkins introduced the method he developed for transfemoral selective coronary angiography, known as the Judkins technique.
1968	René Favaloro reported using a saphenous vein graft to perform the bypass surgery of a human coronary artery.
1968	Norman Shumway performed the first adult cardiac allotransplant in the United States.
1970	H.J.C. Swan and William Ganz invented the balloon-tipped, flow-directed pulmonary artery catheter, the "Swan-Ganz," which allowed for right heart catheterization to be conducted at the bedside.
1972	Harvey Feigenbaum published the first American monograph on echocardiography and began his tireless promotion of the technology.
1976	E.I. Cházov and colleagues reported the successful reperfusion of an infarct-related artery with intracoronary streptokinase in a patient with an acute myocardial infarction.
1977	Andreas Gruentzig performed the first angioplasty on an awake patient, which was the first case to be entered into a worldwide percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA) registry.
1984	Using transvenous catheter ablation, Fred Morady and Melvin M. Scheinman successfully ablated the posteroseptal accessory pathway in a patient with Wolf-Parkinson-White syndrome.
1986	Jacques Puel and Ulrich Sigwart inserted the first stent in a human coronary artery.
1998	Timothy D. Henry reported that the protein vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) could prompt new blood vessel growth to increase blood flow to the heart.