Robert H. Goetz

Life and work

Goetz was born the son of a sculptor and stonemason. After visiting the Frankfurt Helmholtz school and graduating from medical school in Germany in 1934 could not and he did not want to continue his career in Germany because of its anti-Nazi stance despite the fact that he himself was a Protestant.

Further stations of his life led him over to Switzerland and Scotland to South Africa, where he spent the war and the postwar period in Cape Town. He has been involved in academia, among others, with the circulation of wild animals and measured the first cardiac output of big cats and giraffes with the help of the developed by Adolf Fick Fick method. Studies of the blood supply to Giraffe brains were very insightful and groundbreaking. He used in his research very advanced methods such as a 16 mm camera for documentation of his experiments. So he has the method of capture of wild animals with the aid of downed syringes developed with narcotics.

As a physiologist of the circulatory system, he has the sympathectomy thoroughly explored and applied clinically. To this end, he has developed an instrument that was used in the lumbar sympathectomy. The cardiac surgeon Christiaan Barnard was a student of Goetz.

In the 1950s, Goetz went to the USA and took a job at the prestigious Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City on. However, his greatest contribution is likely to be the first coronary artery bypass surgery, which he was able to perform successfully on 2 May 1960. René Favaloro Usually specified as the first to coronary bypass surgery (publication 1967 ). Before Favaloro but already the Soviet surgeon Vasily Kolesow has performed a coronary bypass operation on 25 February 1964. Goetz conducted his operation by without a heart -lung machine, he used the right internal mammary artery anastomosis to the right coronary artery using a tantalum tube. His patient survived postoperatively over a year. The success of the operation was not recognized and Goetz was accused to have acted unethically.

In the 1960s, he also has the concept of "intra- aortic balloon -pump - " developed and get the U.S. patent for this development.

Goetz was a very talented, versatile man. His talent for drawing allowed him to outline many of its operations in the medical histories of the patients.

Swell

• M. P. Harden: PROFESSOR ROBERT GOETZ - INNOVATOR AND PIONEER IN SURGERY Coronary Artery Bypass. ANZ Journal of Surgery, Volume 77, Supplement 1, May 2007, pp. A85- A85 ( 1)