Earlier, when I was teaching and discussing the cardiovascular system with medical students or nurses, I would at times tell them of Werner Forssmann’s epic experiment of self-characterization, but I knew of no other Forssmann until I learned a Dr. Wolf-Georg Forssmann was one of two German professors who had nominated me for a German Humboldt Prize.

After receiving the award, I traveled to Germany and settled in at the Klinikum Innenstadt of the University of Munich, where I worked during my Humboldt tenure. Not long after my arrival, I traveled to Hannover to meet Professor Wolf Forssmann and present a seminar in his department. He then kindly invited me and several members of his staff to dinner at his home.

During a lull in conversation during that pleasant evening, I asked Professor Forssmann, “Are you by chance related to the Werner Forssmann who catheterized his own heart?”

“I am his son,” he said. He went on to tell a bit about his father, much of which I already knew, for I had read his father’s autobiography and other articles he had published. Wolf Forssmann affirmed that his father had faced rough times after he published the account of catheterizing his own heart. His father had written, I was utterly disappointed and bewildered during this time because I felt completely misunderstood and at times rejected. The onslaught so overwhelmed the elder Forssmann that he changed his focus to urology.

But his singular experiment soon began to influence others. His methods were adopted by investigators in Prague and Lisbon, and more importantly they lit a flame in the laboratory of Drs. Andre Cournand and Dickinson Richards in New York City. Within a decade the two men were employing Forssmann’s methodology in patients, pushing their catheters into pulmonary arteries and using other techniques to accurately measure their patients’ cardiac output (the volume of blood pumped by the heart per minute). Their reports spread among clinical circles, and they credited Werner Forssmann for providing the impetus for their work. The world of cardiology was changing rapidly, a change duly noted in Sweden.

In 1956, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly to André Cournand, Werner Forssmann and Dickinson Richards “for their discoveries concerning heart catheterization and pathological changes in the circulatory system.”

It’s generally reported that Forssmann was shocked when he received that special telephone call informing him that he had won the prize. Some accounts claim that he responded by asking, “For what?”

Werner Forssmann’s fame grew quickly as the news spread. He received other honors, and his sudden prestige led to his being named chief of the surgical division of the Evangelical Hospital in Düsseldorf, a far cry, and sudden jump, from his days of private practice. One wonders. Did his honors, and his sudden fame, erase the pain of his earlier treatment? This is what he later wrote:

Even later recognition or fame cannot eliminate the scars which he [the young scientist] acquired during his struggle.  Few have the good fortune after self-denial and personal renunciation, enmities, and humiliations, to achieve recognition and the crown of glory from a grateful younger generation, and even this is no consolation for what the scientist has been through. The young scientist of which he spoke surely was his earlier self.

As he wrote in his autobiography (Experiments on Myself: Memoirs of a Surgeon in Germany [English translation published in 1974] St. Martin’s Press, New York). The Nobel Prize changed our life drastically. Let me say at once this had nothing to do with the money that came with it. In fact the practice Elsbet and I had built up in Bad Kreuznach was so profitable that we had no worries. And one page later, One unpleasant aspect was that we had suddenly become socially desirable.

His autobiography also reveals the thoughts he’d had while listening to the Nobel lectures given by Cournand and Richards. Those lectures revived for me the old doubts of which I’d never been able to dispel. It was true that I had opened the door to modern cardiology. But in the meantime it had outgrown me, and I would never be able to catch up. In my youth I had tried to plant a lovely garden, and now, as an old man I was forced to watch over the hedge while others picked the apples.

I’ll end this story of Werner Forssmann with three sentences that make me smile. They appear near the end of his autobiography.

At the same time I realized I had indeed reached the height of fame. My son, Knut, sent me from Barcelona the wrapper from a new brand of Spanish cigars, on which my picture was printed. You can’t go much further than that.