First suture of a cardiac stab wound (See Figure 1 and Video)
With this overall pessimism about heart surgery in mind, the first
reported suture of a myocardial laceration was performed by the
Norwegian surgeon Axel Cappelen in 1895[7]. A 24-year-old male had a
stab wound to the left chest. He performed a left thoracotomy of the
fourth intercostal space, found a 2-cm laceration of the left ventricle
and sutured it using katgut material. The operation was performed under
chlorophorm anesthesia but unfortunately the patient died on
postoperative sepsis 3 days later. As this first suture on a human
beating heart ended in death, this historical operation has been
overshadowed by the successful suture of a right ventricle injury by the
German surgeon Ludwig Rehn few months later. Indeed, in September 1896
in Frankfurt, a 22-year-old gardener was stabbed in the chest. Rehn, who
was a self-taught surgeon without any prior experience with heart
surgery, realized a left thoracotomy and observed a wound measuring
approximately 1,5 cm in the middle of the right ventricle. He sutured
the heart wound, applying ordinary surgical principles. The patient
recovered and Rehn reported 6 months later this procedure at the German
Society of Surgery.
One year later (1897) was performed in Rome the first suture of the left
ventricle by the surgeon Antonio Parrozzani and in 1907 Rehn reported
124 cases of surgical treatment of heart wounds and a 60% mortality
rates [3], which was still much less than the conservative and
nonoperative treatment…