Marco Piciche`
Editor
2013
One century ago, no surgeon would have dared touch a living human heart, which represented the last frontier in the development of surgery. End-stage heart disease was regarded as the normal termination of life. A few surgeons and cardiologists, however, did not accept this fatality and began dreaming about sophisticated procedures to take up this challenge. Development of novel cardiac surgery procedures required imagination and faith and, indeed, took decades of strenuous work in research laboratories by unknown pioneers. Nothing is more instructive than the history of these developments and that of the men and women who served them and brought them to be. A sterling example is the behaviour of John Gibbon facing the tragic last hours of life of a woman suffering from a massive pulmonary emboli. He felt guilty of not having the means to save her life. During the very night he stood at her bedside, he conceived the heart–lung machine and drew the energy and perseverance required to develop it. It took 20 years to do it and today millions of patients have benefited from this invention.