Forty years of invasive clinical electrophysiology: 1967-2007.

In 2007, we marked the 40th anniversary of the birth of invasive clinical electrophysiology. Of course, before 1967, cardiac arrhythmias were documented electrocardiographically, and their possible mechanisms were analyzed ingeniously and explained beautifully by giants such as Katz and Pick,1 Scherf and Schott,2 and Bellet.3 In the 1940s and 1950s, Hecht,4 Latour and Puech,5 and Giraud et al6 used catheters to measure intracardiac electric activity and to record the sequence of cardiac activation. In 1958, Furman and Robinson7 showed that in patients with atrioventricular block, the heart could be stimulated by connecting an intraventricular catheter to a stimulator.