CME INDIA Presentation by ⚜ Dr. M. Gowri Sankar, MD, Senior Assistant Professor, Dept. of General Medicine, Government Medical College and ESI Hospital, Coimbatore.
Today’s History Feature:
Dr. Andre Cournand
(Sept 24, 1895 – Feb 19, 1988)
💠French Physician & Physiologist
His contributions…
🔹Cournand was born to the physician father, who held numerous patents in dental technology. Cournand was inspired by his father, so he studied natural science and medicine at the Medical School of the University in Paris. After his graduation, he emigrated to U.S. in 1930.
🔹There he joined to work in Columbia University’s Bellevue Hospital in New York, where he began his career as a faculty at medical school in 1935 and then got promoted as a professor in 1951. Simultaneously, he was also the Director of the Cardiopulmonary Laboratory.
🔹Meanwhile, he collaborated with American physician Dr. Dickinson W. Richards to research on Respiration and Circulation. Their collaboration continued for four decades.
🔹In early 1929, Dr. Werner Forssmann, a German physician tested the first prototype for cardiac catheterization by threading a thin catheter through antecubital vein into his heart and took an X-ray image. But unfortunately, his work was not recognized at that time.
🔹During the Second World War, Dr. Cournand and Dr. Richard had done a study on treatment related to traumatic shock and when they came to know about the work of Forssmann’s catheterization, they built upon it by showing that cardiac catheterization could serve as a means of transfusion in cases of traumatic shock.
🔹Furthermore, they expanded the catheterization techniques to measure the pulmonary artery blood pressure and to assess the congenital heart disease.
🔹In 1941, they published a series of studies related to the utilization of cardiac catheterization to measure right atrial and right ventricular pressure, blood volume and oxygen content.
🔹Consequently, his work on developing the cardiac catheterization process was highly recognized and honoured by several prestigious awards such as The Lasker Award of the United States Public Health Association in 1949, The John Philipps Memorial Award of the American College of Physicians in 1952.
🔹Moreover, Cournand was honoured with shared Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1956 along with Dr. Werner Forssmann and Dr. Dickinson W. Richards for their tremendous discoveries concerning cardiac catheterization.
A Day to Commemorate…
A Physician Who Revolutionized the Field of Medicine
Dr. Andre Cournand 🙏🏼
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