Robert Hans Goetz

Robert Hans Goetz

Robert Hans Goetz (born April 17, 1910 in Frankfurt am Main , † December 15, 2000 in Scarsdale , New York ) was a physician, physiologist and surgeon.

Live and act

Goetz was born the son of a sculptor and stonemason. After attending the Helmholtz School in Frankfurt and completing his medical degree in Germany in 1934, he could not and did not want to continue his career in Germany due to his anti-National Socialist attitude despite the fact that he was himself a Protestant.

Further stations in his life took him via Switzerland and Scotland to South Africa, where he spent the war and the post-war period in Cape Town. Among other things, he dealt scientifically with the cycle of wild animals and was the first to measure the cardiac output of big cats and giraffes using the Fick method developed by Adolf Fick . Blood supply studies on giraffe brains have been very insightful and groundbreaking. He used very advanced methods in his research such as B. a 16 mm camera for the documentation of his experiments. He developed the method of capturing wild animals with the help of syringes with narcotics.

As a circulatory physiologist, he carefully researched sympathectomy and then applied it clinically. To do this, he developed an instrument that was used in lumbar sympathectomy. The heart surgeon Christiaan Barnard was a student of Goetz.

In the 1950s Goetz went to the USA and took a position at the renowned Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. His greatest contribution, however, is likely to be the first coronary artery bypass operation, which he was able to successfully perform on May 2, 1960. René Favaloro is usually given as the first person to describe coronary bypass surgery (publication from 1967). Before Favaloro, however, the Soviet surgeon Vasily Kolesow performed a coronary bypass operation on February 25, 1964. Goetz performed his operation without a heart-lung machine; he used the right internal mammary artery to anastomose the right coronary artery with the help of a tantalum tube. His patient survived over a year postoperatively. The success of the operation was not recognized and Goetz was accused of acting unethically.

In the 1960s he also developed the concept of the “intra-aortic balloon pump” and received the US patent for this development.

Goetz was a very talented, versatile person. His talent for drawing allowed him to sketch many of his surgeries in patient histories.

swell

• Wolfgang Saxon: Robert Goetz, 90, Innovator In Coronary Bypass Surgery . Obituary in the New York Times, December 20, 2000 [1]
• MP Harden: PROFESSOR ROBERT GOETZ - INNOVATOR AND PIONEER IN CORONARY ARTERY BYPASS SURGERY . ANZ Journal of Surgery, Volume 77, Supplement 1, May 2007, pp. A85-A85 (1)

literature

• Literature by and about Robert Hans Goetz in the catalog of the German National Library

Web links

• Dov Weissberg: I ​​have chosen surgery (A surgeon's memoir) Chapter 3 (with photo by Goetz)