Inge Edler and the Origins of Clinical Echocardiography

Many cardiologists know that Inge Edler and Hellmuth Hertz started clinical echocardiography in 1953, but few know how their collaboration came about. Edler was working as Director of the Cardiovascular Laboratory at the University Hospital in Lund in the south of Sweden, and one of his duties was to refer patients with rheumatic mitral disease for closed valvotomy. He aimed to select only those with pure mitral stenosis, but sometimes the results were poor and the clinical consequences disastrous. Surgery for this condition had been started in the early 20th century, but largely abandoned due to mortality rates as high as 88%. After the Second World War there was a renaissance of interest in heart surgery, following the experience gained in treating wounds of the heart, but the results for mitral stenosis remained poor, with a mortality of 66% reported in 1950. Edler wondered how