André Frédéric Cournand

André Frédéric Cournand (born September 24, 1895 in Paris , France , † February 19, 1988 in Great Barrington , Berkshire County , Massachusetts , USA ) was a French-American medic . In 1956, together with the German Werner Forßmann and his boss Dickinson Woodruff Richards, he received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries about cardiac catheterization and the pathological changes in the circulatory system ".

life and work

Early years and studies

André Frédéric Cournand was the second of four children of the Paris ENT doctor Jules Cournand and his wife Marguérite Weber. He went to school at the Lycée Condorcet before completing his bachelor's degree at the Faculté des Lettres of the Sorbonne in 1913 and his diploma in physics, chemistry and biology in 1914 at the Faculté des Sciences . In 1914 he started studying medicine, which was interrupted by the First World War. From 1915 to 1918 he served as a soldier and field clerk in the French infantry and was awarded the Croix de Guerre War Order with three bronze stars.

After the war he continued his studies and was accepted as an intern at the Hôpitaux de Paris in 1925 and was able to gain some practical experience in clinical medicine in the following years. He worked in internal medicine under de Massary and Archard, in chest and thoracic medicine under Rist, in pediatrics under Debré and in neurology under Guillain. in May 1930 he was recognized for his doctoral thesis on acute multiple sclerosis at the Faculté de Médecine in Paris doctorate .

Research work in New York

During a residency in by James Alexander Miller and J. Burns Amberson led tuberculosis clinic at Bellevue Hospital in New York in 1934 was it by the physiologist Dickinson W. Richards a permanent job as a research assistant in the field of physiology and pathophysiology of the respiratory systems offered that he assumed. In 1941 he became an American citizen. Together with Richards and numerous other doctors, he carried out numerous studies on the human cardiovascular system at the Bellevue Hospital and, above all, its heart-lung laboratory . During the Second World War he advised the Office of Scientific and Research Developments and the Chemical Warfare Service of the American military in the field of chemical warfare.

Cournand and Richards studied various cardiovascular ailments and used right heart catheterization to investigate various diseases. In 1945 Cournand published an article on the measurement of cardiac output with the help of cardiac catheter examinations, and together with Richards they both worked on using the Fick principle developed by Adolf Fick to determine cardiac output and to examine pulmonary circulation . They use the method, for example, to examine traumatic shock, the effects of heart medication and heart diseases, their treatment and their diagnosis. They optimized the catheterization and explored its possible applications first in animal experiments on dogs and chimpanzees and later also on humans. By the end of the 1930s, they were able to identify complex and previously unknown heart defects and enable treatment. They introduced the scientifically determined method of measuring cardiac output with the help of the right heart catheter into clinical medicine, where it quickly established itself as the standard method. Together with the imaging angiocardiography , the catheter examination enabled comprehensive diagnostics of the heart and, based on this, modern cardiology . In 1949 Cournand showed the possibility of right heart catheterization to identify congenital heart defects. He later became the first doctor to perform pulmonary catheterization using a catheter that he could pass through the right heart and pulmonary artery into the lungs.

Scientific recognition

The work of Cournand and Richards built on Werner Forßmann's early work on cardiac catheterization . Together with them, Forßmann also received the Nobel Prize in 1956

In 1956 Cournand received the Nobel Prize in Medicine together with Richards and Forßmann “for their discoveries about cardiac catheterization and the pathological changes in the circulatory system ”. This was awarded to him, among other things, for the first physiological studies with the heart catheter on living people (published in 1941).

Cournand became a visiting lecturer and professor of medicine at Columbia University in 1951 . He received numerous scientific honors and was President of the Harvey Society from 1960 to 1961 , to which he was appointed in 1950, and a member of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada (since 1952). He also became a member of the editorial boards of numerous scientific journals, including Circulation , Physiological Reviews , the American Journal of Physiology and the Journal de Physiologie as well as the Revue Française d'Etúdes Cliniques et Biologiques . In 1951 he was asked by the Association des Médecins de Langue Française to give a guest lecture on chronic heart failure and he held other honorary lectures at the University of Leiden in 1958 and the University of Bern in 1962. In 1958 Cournand was admitted to the National Academy of Sciences , 1975 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected. Since 1957 he was a member ( associé étranger ) of the Académie des sciences in Paris.

Cournand died on February 19, 1988 in Great Barrington , Berkshire County , Massachusetts . He was married to Sibylle Blumer, Birel Rosset's widow, and adopted their son Pierre Birel Rosset-Cournand. They also had three daughters together: Muriel, Marie-Eve and Marie-Claire. Pierre Birel Rosset-Cournand fell in France during World War II in 1944 and his wife died in 1959.

Honors

• Croix de guerre with three bronze stars (1918)
• Anders-Retzius Silver Medal from the Swedish Society of Internal Medicine (1946)
• Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research from the United States Public Health Association (1949)
• John Philipps Memorial Award from the American College of Physicians (1952)
• Nobel Prize for Medicine , together with Werner Forßmann and Dickinson Woodruff Richards (1956)
• Gold medal of the Académie Royale de Médecine de Belgique of the Académie Nationale de Médecine, Paris (1956)
• Honorary doctorates from the Universities of Strasbourg (1957), Lyon (1958), Brussels (1959), Pisa (1961) and Birmingham (1961)
• Advisor to the Délégué Général de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique of the French government (since 1958)
• Officier de la Legion d'Honneur
• Commandeur des Palmes Académiques

literature

• Cournand, André Frédéric In: Bernhard Kupfer: Lexicon of Nobel Prize Winners. Patmos-Verlag, Düsseldorf 2001; Pp. 206-207. ISBN 3-491-72451-1 .

Web links

• Information from the Nobel Foundation on the 1956 award to André Frédéric Cournand (English)

supporting documents

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} André F. Cournand - Biographical. on the pages of the Nobel Foundation for the award ceremony in 1956 (English); Published in: Nobel Lectures, Physiology or Medicine 1942-1962, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam 1964. Retrieved from nobelprize.org on March 6, 2014
2. ^ André Frédéric Cournand: Control of the Pulmonary Circulation in Man with Some Remarks on Methodology. Nobel lecture on December 11, 1956. Full text
3. ^ Richards, Dickinson Woodruff In: Bernhard Kupfer: Lexicon of Nobel Prize Winners. Patmos-Verlag, Düsseldorf 2001; Pp. 261-262. ISBN 3-491-72451-1 .
4. ↑ ^{a b c d} Cournand, André Frédéric In: Bernhard Kupfer: Lexicon of Nobel Prize Winners. Patmos-Verlag, Düsseldorf 2001; Pp. 206-207. ISBN 3-491-72451-1 .
5. ^ Forßmann, Werner Theodor Otto In: Bernhard Kupfer: Lexicon of Nobel Prize Winners. Patmos-Verlag, Düsseldorf 2001; P. 221. ISBN 3-491-72451-1 .
6. ^ List of members since 1666: Letter C. Académie des sciences, accessed on November 2, 2019 (French).