René Favaloro: le ragioni del cuore

Rene' Favaloro is the Italo-Argentine surgeon that May 9, 1967, in Cleveland, Ohio, run first coronary artery bypass grafting.Were few to seize exceptional relevance of the work of Favaloro, and even fewer today remember the name, even though from forty-five years, and every day in hospitals around the world, is the leading lifesaving intervention in cardiac surgery. In 1962 he joined the group of researchers at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, United States, that has been working with excellent results on vascular surgery. He performed the first coronary artery bypass grafting on a woman of 51 years with total occlusion of the proximal third of the right coronary artery. The success of Favaloro shows that an heart can be repaired and the history of coronary artery disease can be positively changed. Favaloro returned to Argentina in 1971 and four years later founded the Favaloro Fundacion; a center of primary importance in the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. Treatments were financed by the state and from the personal funds of the doctor. He also created an excellent research laboratory (1980) and the Universidad Favaloro (1998) in which hundreds of students were formed to the new techonologies. At the end of the nineties, Argentina had a terrible economic crisis. The Center Favaloro fell in bankruptcy. The closure of the center would mean a return to that kind of medicine that treats only those who can pay, and against which the doctor has always struggled with all his might. After writing in vain to the president Fernando De La Rúa, July 29 2000, Favaloro shooted himself at heart with a 38 caliber pistol.