Historical Perspective and Present Practice of Cardiac Catheterization

It is difficult to imagine what our concepts of heart disease might be like today if we had to construct them without the enormous reservoir of physiologic and anatomic knowledge derived from the past 60 years' experience in the cardiac catheterization laboratory. As Andre Cournand remarked in his Nobel lecture of December 11, 1956, “the cardiac catheter was. . . the key in the lock” . By turning this key, Cournand and his colleagues led us into a new era in the understanding of normal and disordered cardiac function in humans. (1)