Andre Frederic Cournand
(1895 - 1988)
French-American physician and physiologist who in 1956 shared the Nobel
Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Dickinson W. Richards and Werner
Forssmann for discoveries concerning heart catheterization and circulatory
changes.
His medical studies interrupted by World War I, Cournand graduated from
the University of Paris in 1930. He studied at Bellevue Hospital, New
York City, where he met Richards. Together they collaborated in clinical
lung and heart research and perfected Forssmann's procedure, now termed
cardiac catheterization, whereby a tube is passed into the heart from
a vein at the elbow. With this procedure it became possible to study
the functioning of the diseased human heart and to make more accurate
diagnoses of the underlying anatomic defects. Cournand and Richards
also used the catheter to examine the pulmonary artery, thus enabling
improvement in the diagnosis of lung diseases as well.
Cournand joined the faculty of the College of Physicians and Surgeons
of Columbia University in 1934, retiring as emeritus professor of medicine
in 1964. He remained active as a special lecturer until his final illness.
He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1941.
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