European Heart Journal Advance Access originally published online on December 10, 2007
European Heart Journal 2008 29(3):422-423; doi:10.1093/eurheartj/ehm549
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Published on behalf of the European Society of Cardiology. All rights reserved. © The Author 2007. For permissions please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.
Otto Klein—the forgotten founder of diagnostic cardiac catheterization
í Widimsk
Department of Cardiology
Institute of Clinical and Experimental Medicine
Prague 4
Czech Republic
Email: widimsky@seznam.cz
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Otto Klein's pioneering work. Werner Forsmann introduced a catheter into his own heart in 1928 to show the feasibility of this technique for injection of drugs directly into the heart.
However, Otto Klein has to be credited for the first diagnostic right-heart catheterization. In 1929, he performed, as the first in the world, 11 successful right-heart catheterizations including passage of the