“A Severe Attack of Common Sense”: Sven Ivar Seldinger (1921–1998) and the Birth of Interventional Medicine

Special Communication: Looking Back on the Birth and Early Days of Interventional Radiology: Reflections of Dr. Stanley Baum

“…He studied percutaneous angiography with Dr. Herbert Abrams who helped bring this technique to the United States from Sweden, where it was first developed in the 1950s and refined in the 1960s. 4 To that point, it was previously possible only to navigate a catheter into the endovascular space through invasive arterial cutdown and lumbar punctures. With the advent of the Seldinger technique, the young Dr. Baum was fascinated by the potential to image any organ of the body by the percutaneous introduction of a catheter.…”

Interventional radiology and the liver vasculature: A personal perspective

“…The history of angiography is decorated with names known well to interventionists. Before Charles Dotter (1920–1985; the “Father of IR”), who performed the first percutaneous transluminal angioplasty in 1964 and whose bravado ignited the growth of modern IR, 6 there was António Caetano de Abreu Freire Egas Moniz (1874–1955), the Portuguese 1949 Nobel Laureate — for his unfortunate discovery of the short-lived therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses — who in 1927 performed cerebral angiography, and the German Werner Theodor Otto Forßman (1904–1979) who in 1929 dramatically self-catheterized his heart despite the protests of everyone within earshot, 7 an achievement for which he too was rewarded with a Nobel Prize almost 3 decades later in 1956 jointly with Paris-born André Frédéric Cournand (1895–1988) and Dickinson Richards (1895–1973) of Orange, NJ. Subsequently, there was F. Mason Sones Jr. (1918–1985) of the Cleveland Clinic, who was known as the Father of Coronary Angiography after he serendipitously discovered coronary artery cannulation.…”