Interlude: An Affair of the Heart
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way for surgeons to treat arterial blockages that caused so many heart attacks and cardiac deaths. Surgeons at the Cleveland Clinic next took up the baton for advancements in cardiac surgery. Dr. Mason Sones performed the world’s first coronary angiography in 1958, and Argentina’s Dr. Rene Favalaro is credited with the first coronary bypass surgery at the Cleveland Clinic in 1967. The bypass surgery, which involved placing the patient on a heart-lung bypass machine and stripping veins out of his or her legs to replace blocked sections of artery, revolutionized cardiac surgery. By the mid1970s, 250,000 heart bypass surgeries were being done nationwide each year. Today, nearly a half-
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Below: Construction, new bays
Presbyterian Healthcare Services Photoarchive
1972
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