Alexis Carrel's Contributions to Thoracic Surgery

Alexis Carrel, a French surgeon, moved to America in 1904 and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1912. In this eight-year interval, during which Carrel worked with Charles Guthrie at the University of Chicago as well as independently at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, he made some fundamental contributions to vascular surgery, such as establishing the use of autologous veins for arterial grafts. What is less well known is that he also made major contributions to thoracic and cardiac surgery by perfecting endotracheal anesthesia, demonstrating pulmonary and esophageal resections, and doing prophetic experiments on heart valves and coronary arteries: forty years passed before these operations were performed in a clinical setting.