Why doctors fail | Atul Gawande | News | The Guardian:
But Forssmann just had to give it a try. So he stole into the x-ray
room, took a urinary catheter, made a slit in his own arm, threaded it
up his vein and into his own heart and convinced a nurse to help him
take a series of nine x-rays showing the tube inside his own heart.
He published the evidence – and was fired. Then in 1956, he was awarded the Nobel prize in medicine with André Cournand and Dickinson Richards
who, some 20 years later at Columbia University, had taken Forssmann’s
findings and recognised that you could not only put a catheter into the
human heart but also shoot dye through the catheter. That enabled them
to take pictures and see from the inside how the heart actually worked.
Together the three had founded the field of cardiology.