When I wrote the story of Werner Forssmann catheterizing of his own heart, I ignored my more personal debt to Forssmann’s striking accomplishment. That personal debt was sparked some years ago, on one sunny morning as I tramped up a long hill. The hill was familiar, but what happened that […]

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 […]

Some medical discoveries fade as they settle into history. Others glow brightly. Here’s a little quiz for you. The poliomyelitis virus was a nasty crippler and killer that terrorized the world until the mid-1950s. Which of the following won the Nobel Prize for their work on the polio virus? John […]

This piece is a bit different from others I’ve written here. I wrote this one years ago and published it in the Kansas City Star. I dug out a clipping of it today, retyped it with minimal changes (it originally was written with a typewriter), and here it is, an […]