1896

Stephen Paget writes in The Surgery of the Chest: “Surgery of the heart has probably reached the limits set by Nature to all surgery: no new method, and no new discovery, can overcome the natural difficulties that attend a wound of the heart.” Ludwig Rehn of Frankfurt am Main successfully sutures with silk threat of .6-inch a knife wound in the right ventricle (Morris states the wound was “in the surface of the cardiac muscle” [loc 412]) , then packing the pleural cavity with iodoform gauze (Richardson, 30-31; Morris, loc 404ff. ). First surgeon to remove a bullet lodged in heart was Estonian Werner von Manteuffel in 1903. He removed bullet lodged in right ventricle by lifting the heart to cut out the bullet (Morris, loc 452).