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…