Werner Forssmann

Werner Theodor Otto Forssmann was born in Berlin on 29 August 1904 and studied medicine at the University of Berlin, passing his state examination in 1929. During clinical training that year at the August Victoria Home at Eberswalde near Berlin he was the first to develop a technique for catheterization of the heart. He inserted a cannula into his own antecubital vein, passed a catheter for 65 centimetres and then walked to the X-ray department, where a photograph showed the catheter lying in his right auricle. He later trained in urology, served as a sanitary officer in the Second World War and was a prisoner of war until 1945. In 1956 he was awarded, together with Andre Cournand and Dickinson W. Richards, the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.