Romualdo segurola biography of williams

Though an African-American physician in Chicago, Daniel Hale Williams, is credited with performing an open-heart procedure in 1893 by closing a stab wound to the organ, it would be more than a half-century before a series of breakthroughs slowly shed light on all that was possible involving cardiac surgery.

Developments during the mid-20th century, including valve replacement, bypass techniques and the introduction of arteriography (so surgeons can see where blockages are located), allowed medical specialists to treat the heart like never before.

Still, it wasn’t that long ago that patients were wheeled out of the operating room following open-heart surgery with a zipper-like swath of stitches that spanned the length of their abdomen.

“Open-heart surgeons were swimming in some uncharted waters back in those early days,” says Romualdo Segurola, chief of cardiac surgery for Jackson Health System.

“Looking back, I guess you can say they really didn’t know how much they didn’t know.