Germany, 1929: everyone knew the human heart was too dangerous to touch — so a young doctor tried it on himself.
Ten items. Work through the four activities — say your answer out loud before you reveal it.
Three words: reckless · ridicule · pioneer. Say the right one, then reveal.
Read each part. After it, there's a quick check (answer from memory first), then one question to discuss.
In the 1920s, doctors knew a great deal about the heart from the outside. They could listen to it, feel its pulse and see its shape in a dead body. But nobody had looked at a living heart from the inside. The heart was believed to be too delicate to touch. Pushing anything into it was thought to be certain death, and most senior doctors would not even discuss the idea.
Werner Forssmann was a twenty-five-year-old trainee surgeon at a small hospital near Berlin. He was not famous and he was not important. But he had read about an old experiment: in the 1860s, two French scientists had pushed a tube through a vein of a living horse, all the way into its heart, and the horse had survived. Forssmann asked himself a simple question. If a horse could do it, why not a human being?
He took the idea to his head of department, who refused at once. The risk was too great and the reason was not clear. Forssmann was told to forget it.
1. What did doctors believe about the heart, and why did this matter?
2. What gave Forssmann his idea, and how did his boss react?
1. That it was too delicate to touch from the inside — pushing anything into it meant death. So nobody had ever seen a living heart's inside.
2. An old experiment in which a tube was pushed through a horse's vein into its heart without killing it. His head of department refused immediately and told him to forget it.
In 1929, Forssmann decided to do it anyway. According to some accounts, a surgical nurse called Gerda Ditzen offered to be his first volunteer. Forssmann pretended to agree, then fixed her to the table — and carried out the procedure on himself instead. Historians disagree about the details of this story, but nobody disputes the main fact.
Using a local anaesthetic, he made a small cut in the vein at his left elbow. He pushed a thin catheter, about sixty-five centimetres long, into the vein and fed it slowly forward. When it was about half-way in, he stood up with the tube still in his arm and walked down the stairs to the X-ray department. There, with the nurse holding a mirror so that he could see the screen, he pushed the catheter further. The X-ray picture showed the tip clearly. It was inside the right side of his heart.
He was alive, and he felt almost nothing. For the first time in history, a human heart had been entered from the inside by a tube — and the person doing it was walking around, unharmed. He later repeated the experiment several times, and in 1929 he published a short paper describing it.
1. What did Forssmann actually do, step by step?
2. What did the X-ray show, and why was it historic?
1. Local anaesthetic, a cut in a vein at his elbow, a long catheter fed forward, a walk down the stairs to the X-ray department with the tube still in place, then the final push with the nurse holding a mirror.
2. The catheter's tip was inside his heart. It proved that a living human heart could be entered safely — the first time it had ever been shown.
Forssmann expected praise. Instead, he was ridiculed. Senior doctors called the experiment a circus trick and a reckless stunt. His hospital dismissed him, and he found it hard to get work in heart research again. He left the field, retrained in another branch of medicine, and worked for years as a doctor in a small German town. His discovery was almost forgotten.
But a few scientists had read his paper. In New York in the 1940s, André Cournand and Dickinson Richards began to use a catheter in the heart, not as a stunt, but as a tool: to measure pressure and oxygen, and to diagnose heart disease in living patients. In 1956 the three men shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Forssmann was working in a small German hospital when he heard.
Today the technique is among the most common in medicine. Cardiac catheters are used every day, all over the world, to find blockages, to measure what is going wrong and to repair it from the inside — without opening the chest. It began with a trainee, a long tube and a walk down a flight of stairs.
1. How did the hospital and senior doctors react?
2. How did the catheter finally become a medical tool, and what happened to Forssmann in the end?
1. They ridiculed it as a circus stunt and reckless. The hospital dismissed him and his heart-research career was effectively over.
2. Cournand and Richards, in New York in the 1940s, used the catheter to measure and diagnose in living patients. In 1956 the three shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
This story is full of things people believed, said and knew — some true, some false. English has a neat passive pattern for it.
Put the verb in brackets into the correct infinitive form.
1. At the time, the human heart was believed (be) too fragile to enter.
2. Forssmann is said (insert) the catheter into his own arm in 1929.
3. Today, cardiac catheters are known (save) thousands of lives every year.
1. to be 2. to have inserted 3. to save
Ask one question each time: is the action before the belief (to have + participle) or at the same time (to + base)?
Rewrite each sentence with the passive pattern. Say it, then reveal a model.
Take the pattern into the Speak tab — a famous story is exactly where "is said to" belongs.
A note on the record: the broad facts are well documented — the 1929 catheter, the X-ray, the dismissal and the 1956 Nobel Prize. Some of the colourful details, such as the nurse's part, rest on later accounts and are still debated.
All of it out loud, against the clock. Reporting verbs belong to stories like this one — use them to separate what people believed from what was true.
Tell it as a story of belief against evidence: the untouchable heart → the horse and the question → the refusal → the walk to the X-ray room → the ridicule and the dismissal → New York and the Nobel Prize → today.
Use at least four reporting structures (is said to have, was believed to be…) and five key words (catheter, vein, anaesthetic, volunteer, reckless, ridicule, dismiss, pioneer, procedure).
Two rounds. Round one: you are the young doctor, asking the hospital board to let you try the procedure. Round two: you are the board — explain why you are refusing. The test is how well each side explains risk and responsibility.
A researcher wants to test a risky new idea on herself before testing anyone else. Argue for and against. Then decide: under what conditions should it be allowed?
Prefer a ready-made scenario? Take one of these: