The history
3,500 years from Egyptian scrolls about the heart's vessels to pacemakers, new valves slid in through an artery, and a pig's heart beating in a human chest.
For most of history people knew the heart was important, but not what it did. Ancient doctors thought blood was made in the liver and soaked into the body, and that it leaked through tiny holes inside the heart. Slowly, by cutting, looking, measuring and listening, people found that the heart is a pump that sends the same blood round and round two loops, driven by its own electricity. In the last hundred years that knowledge let doctors open the heart, restart it, pace it, clear its arteries and even replace it.
c. 1550 BCE
Written idea of vessels joining the heart to the body
Ebers Papyrus, Egypt
c. 1242
Correct description of blood passing through the lungs
Ibn al-Nafis, Cairo
1628
Proof that blood circulates
William Harvey, England
c. 1710
Blood pressure measured
Stephen Hales, England
1816
Stethoscope
René Laennec, France
1887
Human heartbeat recorded electrically
Augustus Waller, England
1953
Open-heart surgery with a heart-lung machine
John Gibbon, USA
1958
Implanted pacemaker
Elmqvist and Senning, Sweden
1967
Human heart transplant
Christiaan Barnard, South Africa
1994
Successful heart transplant in India
P. Venugopal, AIIMS New Delhi
1600 BCE – 1500
The heart is seen as the centre of life. Galen's ideas rule for over a thousand years, and one doctor in Cairo spots that blood must pass through the lungs.
1550 BCE
c. 1550 BCE
The Ebers Papyrus is one of the oldest medical texts we have. It has a section on the heart, which it treats as the centre of the body, with vessels called metu running from it to every limb. The Egyptians thought these vessels carried many things, not just blood.
Why it mattered. It is one of the first written ideas that the heart is linked to the whole body through tubes.
170
2nd century CE
Galen, a Greek doctor working in the Roman Empire, taught that blood is made in the liver and carried out by the veins to be used up. He said some blood seeped from the right side of the heart to the left through tiny, invisible pores in the wall between them. His books were followed for well over a thousand years.
Why it mattered. His model was so trusted that it took centuries of careful looking to prove the heart is really a pump in a loop.
1242
c. 1242 (usual dating)
In his Commentary on Anatomy in Avicenna's Canon, usually dated to about 1242, the Damascus-born doctor Ibn al-Nafis said there are no pores in the heart's middle wall. Instead, blood from the right side must travel through the lungs, mix with air, and come back to the left side. Europe did not learn of his work until the 20th century.
Why it mattered. It is the first known correct description of the lung loop, the pulmonary circulation.
1500 – 1700
Anatomists look for themselves, doubt Galen's hidden holes, and William Harvey shows that blood goes round and round, pushed by the heart.
1543
Vesalius, a young Flemish professor, dissected human bodies himself and published a huge illustrated book, De humani corporis fabrica. He wrote that he could not see Galen's pores in the heart. In the 1555 edition he went further and said no blood passes through that wall at all.
Why it mattered. It taught doctors to trust what they could see over what old books said.
1553
Servetus, a Spanish doctor and theologian, described blood passing through the lungs in a book about religion, Christianismi Restitutio. His religious ideas were judged heresy, and he and nearly every copy of the book were burned in Geneva in 1553. Only a few copies survived.
Why it mattered. It shows the lung loop was found again in Europe, but almost lost for good.
1559
Colombo, who had worked with Vesalius in Padua, described the lung loop in his book De re anatomica, published the year he died. He backed it up with dissections and experiments on living animals. William Harvey later gave him credit.
Why it mattered. His book spread the idea of the lung loop among European doctors.
1628
Harvey, an English doctor, published a short book called De Motu Cordis, On the Motion of the Heart and Blood. With experiments and simple sums, he showed the heart pumps far more blood than the body could ever make from food. So the same blood must flow out through arteries and back through veins in a circle.
Why it mattered. It is the moment the heart became a pump and circulation was born.
1661
Harvey could not see how blood got from arteries to veins. Malpighi looked at a frog's thin lung under an early microscope and saw tiny vessels joining the two. He described them in De pulmonibus in 1661.
Why it mattered. It closed the last gap in Harvey's circle.
1700 – 1930
People measure blood pressure, listen to the heart with a tube, and record its tiny electrical signals as a wavy line.
1733
Experiment c. 1710; published 1733
Hales, a vicar and scientist, tied a glass tube about 9 feet long into an artery of a mare lying on her back. The blood rose about 8 feet 3 inches up the tube and bobbed with every heartbeat. He described it in his book Haemastaticks in 1733.
Why it mattered. It was the first measurement of blood pressure, the push the heart gives the blood.
1816
Laennec felt it would be improper to press his ear to a young woman's chest. He rolled some paper into a tube, put one end on her chest, and heard her heart more clearly than ever. He then made wooden tubes and wrote a book in 1819 linking chest sounds to diseases.
Why it mattered. Doctors could now listen to the heart's valves closing without cutting anyone open.
1887
May 1887
Waller used a capillary electrometer, a thin tube of mercury that twitches with electric current, to record a human heartbeat from the outside of the body. The trace was faint and blurry. Later he even recorded his dog Jimmy standing in bowls of salty water.
Why it mattered. It proved the heart's electrical signal can be picked up on the skin, the idea behind every ECG.
1896
Riva-Rocci wrapped an inflatable cuff around the upper arm, pumped it up with a rubber bulb, and read the pressure on a column of mercury. When the pulse at the wrist vanished, the cuff pressure matched the top blood pressure.
Why it mattered. Blood pressure could now be measured quickly and safely on anyone, without cutting an artery.
1903
1901–1903
Einthoven built a string galvanometer: a very thin wire between strong magnets that moves when the heart's current flows through it. Its shadow was photographed as a clear wavy line, the electrocardiogram. He named its bumps P, Q, R, S and T, names still used today, and won the 1924 Nobel Prize.
Why it mattered. It gave doctors a picture of the heart's electrical rhythm, still one of medicine's most used tests.
1905
8 November 1905
Korotkoff, a young army surgeon, put a stethoscope below a pressure cuff and let the air out slowly. He heard tapping sounds start and then stop, and showed they mark the top and bottom blood pressure. His report was less than a page long.
Why it mattered. The two numbers you get at a clinic, like 120 over 80, still come from his method.
1929 – 1970
Surgeons finally dare to work on the heart. Machines breathe and pump for patients, electric shocks restart hearts, pacemakers keep time, and a heart is transplanted.
1929
Forssmann, a young junior doctor, slid a thin tube into a vein in his own arm and pushed it up into his heart. He then walked to the X-ray room to take a picture of it. His bosses thought it was a stunt, and he was dismissed from his next job.
Why it mattered. It showed a tube could safely reach the heart, the start of cardiac catheterisation.
1944
29 November 1944
Paediatric cardiologist Helen Taussig saw that some babies turned blue because too little blood reached their lungs. Surgeon Alfred Blalock and his lab technician Vivien Thomas worked out an operation to join an artery to the lung artery, and Thomas guided Blalock through the first one. The little girl, Eileen Saxon, turned pink.
Why it mattered. It was one of the first operations to fix a heart problem, and it saved thousands of children.
1947
During surgery on a 14-year-old boy, his heart began to quiver instead of beat. Beck's team massaged it by hand, then shocked it directly with electrodes. A normal rhythm came back and the boy recovered.
Why it mattered. It was the first time a human heart was saved with defibrillation.
1953
6 May 1953
Gibbon spent nearly two decades building a heart-lung machine that pumps blood and adds oxygen outside the body. He used it for 26 minutes while he closed a hole in the heart of Cecelia Bavolek, an 18-year-old student. She recovered.
Why it mattered. It was the first successful open-heart operation using a heart-lung machine, the start of modern heart surgery.
1956
Cournand and Richards, working in New York from 1941, turned Forssmann's daring experiment into a safe way to measure pressure and oxygen inside the heart. In 1956 the three shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Why it mattered. Catheters became one of the main tools for studying and later treating the heart.
1958
8 October 1958
Arne Larsson's heart kept stopping, up to 30 times a day. Engineer Rune Elmqvist cast a small pacemaker in resin, using a plastic cup as a mould, and surgeon Åke Senning put it under his skin. The first one failed within hours, but Larsson went on to use 26 pacemakers and lived to 86.
Why it mattered. A tiny electric device could now keep the heart's rhythm for years.
1960
11 March 1960
Surgeon Nina Starr Braunwald designed and made an artificial mitral valve with flexible plastic flaps. She led the team that put it into a 44-year-old woman, the first successful replacement of that valve with a human-made one. She was 32.
Why it mattered. Worn-out valves, the heart's one-way doors, could now be replaced.
1960
9 July 1960
An electrical engineer, a surgeon and a young engineer found that pushing down hard and fast on the breastbone squeezes the heart enough to move blood. They reported it in a short paper in 1960. With rescue breathing, it became cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR.
Why it mattered. Anyone with training and two hands can keep blood moving until help arrives.
1961
1961 (some sources say 1962)
Surgeon N. Gopinath used a heart-lung machine to close a hole between the heart's lower chambers. It is widely recorded as the first open-heart operation in India. Surgeons in Bombay were working towards the same goal at the time.
Why it mattered. It began the growth of open-heart surgery in India.
1967
3 December 1967
Barnard's team gave Louis Washkansky, a 53-year-old grocer, the heart of Denise Darvall, a young woman killed in a car crash. The new heart was started with an electric shock and worked well. Washkansky died of pneumonia 18 days later, because the drugs that stopped rejection also weakened his defences.
Why it mattered. It showed a heart could be moved from one person to another and work.
1970 – today
Balloons, valves and tubes travel to the heart through arteries, while artificial hearts and transplants spread around the world, including India.
1977
16 September 1977
Grüntzig threaded a thin tube with a tiny balloon into a narrowed artery on the heart of Adolf Bachmann, a 38-year-old with chest pain. He blew up the balloon to squash the blockage open. No chest was cut open.
Why it mattered. It started interventional cardiology, and today stents placed this way treat millions of people.
1982
2 December 1982
Retired dentist Barney Clark received the Jarvik-7, a plastic and metal heart driven by air from a large machine beside his bed. He lived for 112 days.
Why it mattered. It proved a machine could replace a heart, and led to pumps that help people wait for transplants.
1994
3 August 1994
A team led by P. Venugopal gave Devi Ram a new heart from a brain-dead donor. Earlier attempts in Bombay in 1968, led by P. K. Sen, had not survived the day. Devi Ram lived for many years afterwards.
Why it mattered. It opened the way for heart transplants across India.
2002
16 April 2002
Cribier squeezed an artificial valve onto a balloon, guided it through blood vessels to the heart, and opened it inside a stiff, narrowed aortic valve. The 57-year-old patient was too ill for open surgery. His blood pressure recovered within minutes.
Why it mattered. TAVI now lets many older patients get a new valve through a small cut in the leg.
2022
7 January 2022
David Bennett, 57, was too ill for a normal transplant. Surgeons gave him the heart of a pig whose genes had been changed so the human body would be less likely to reject it. He lived about two months.
Why it mattered. Animal hearts might one day ease the shortage of human donor hearts.
1990 – today
Heart and blood vessel disease becomes the world's biggest killer, and countries everywhere work to prevent it as well as treat it.
2000
24 September 2000
The World Heart Federation and the World Health Organization started World Heart Day to tell people how to protect their hearts. Since 2011 it has been held every year on 29 September.
Why it mattered. It marks a shift from only treating heart disease to preventing it everywhere.
By the numbers
Global Burden of Disease estimates: yearly deaths from cardiovascular disease have risen by about half since 1990, largely because there are more people and they live longer.
Did you know?
A healthy heart beats about 100,000 times a day.
The stethoscope began as a rolled-up sheet of paper, because Laennec felt it was improper to put his ear on a young woman's chest.
Stephen Hales's horse pushed its blood about 8 feet 3 inches up a glass tube.
Werner Forssmann pushed a tube into his own heart, and a famous surgeon said such capers belonged in a circus. 27 years later Forssmann shared a Nobel Prize for it.
Arne Larsson, the first person with an implanted pacemaker, went through 26 of them and outlived both the engineer and the surgeon who made the first.
The people
1213 – 1288 · Physician · Damascus, worked in Cairo
Described the lung loop of the circulation centuries before Europe.
1578 – 1657 · Physician · England
Showed that the heart pumps the same blood round and round.
1677 – 1761 · Clergyman and scientist · England
First to measure blood pressure, using a glass tube and a horse.
1781 – 1826 · Physician · France
Invented the stethoscope and linked chest sounds to disease.
1860 – 1927 · Physiologist · Born in Java, worked in the Netherlands
Built the first practical ECG and won the 1924 Nobel Prize.
1898 – 1986 · Paediatric cardiologist · USA
Came up with the idea behind the blue baby operation and helped found paediatric cardiology.
1910 – 1985 · Surgical technician · USA
Worked out the blue baby operation in the lab and guided the surgeon through the first one.
1928 – 1992 · Heart surgeon · USA
Designed and implanted the first successful artificial mitral valve.
1922 – 2001 · Heart surgeon · South Africa
Led the first human heart transplant.
1942 – 2024 · Heart surgeon · India
Led India's first successful heart transplant at AIIMS.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
↑↓ move↵ open/ or ⌘K search anywhere