SH17PROFESSOR ROBERT GOETZ - INNOVATOR AND PIONEER IN CORONARY ARTERY BYPASS SURGERY

Coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) is one of the most significant surgical achievements of the 20th century. The contributions of Vineberg, Kolesoz, Favaloro and DeBakey are well known, but the name of Goetz means little to most surgeons. Goetz performed the world's first successful CABG on May 2, 1960, in Bronx, N.Y. Robert H. Goetz was born in Frankfurt on April 17, 1910 and studied medicine at the University of Frankfurt. In the 1950's he studied the physiology of the giraffe, whose ability to lift its head from the ground to full height without fainting confounded zoologists, earning him the Vesalius Medal. In 1960 Goetz developed a technique for coronary anastomosis on a beating heart using a tantalum ring on dogs. In an addendum to his article reporting this technique, Goetz announced the successful coronary mammary anastomosis between the right mammary and right coronary on a 38 year old man. The anastomosis was created in just 17 seconds. Before surgery the patient suffered from such debilitating angina that he needed 70 to 90 tablets of GTN a day. He remained pain free for 1 year and died of a posterior wall AMI. Angiogram at autopsy showed the anastomosis to be healed and patent. This was to be the only CABG Goetz completed. Permission to present this case at a meeting of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery was denied, as it was felt that the subject of CABG was unimportant and should be forgotten. In 1982, Goetz retired from surgery and bred prize-winning Angus bulls as a hobby and died on 15 December, 2000, in Scarsdale, N.Y. He was a remarkable academic surgeon with vision that aided the development of one of the most important surgical advances of the last 50 years. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]