European Perspectives

A Journey into the Heart by science writer David Monagan does discuss a number of heart pioneers, it really amounts to a biography of Dr Andreas Grüntzig, inventor of the first balloon catheter for coronary angioplasty, and an account of the industry that mushroomed from his work. Mr Monagan conducted more than 100 interviews in the United States, Switzerland, and Germany. He portrays his interviewees (many of them cardiology pioneers in their own right) both as they are now and as they were during Dr Grüntzig’s lifetime. He harvests and sifts their words to produce a rich, frank, dramatic portrait of Dr Grüntzig and his impact on those he worked with, treated, trained, and loved. The book aims to entertain and inform a wide nonspecialist readership, and so it is technically simplistic. An article in Circulation by Dr Grüntzig’s friend Spencer B. King III, MD, provides a more scientific, well-illustrated, concise, and medically orientated account of Dr Grüntzig’s life and work. Dr King practises at the Andreas Grüntzig Cardiovascular Center, Emory University Hospital, Atlanta, Ga. The Web site angioplasty.org has short video clips featuring Dr Grüntzig and discussing his contributions. A Child of the Rubble Andreas Grüntzig was a war baby, born in 1939 in Dresden, Germany. His father, Wilmar Grüntzig, PhD, taught science, but the Luftwaffe weather unit drafted him, and he probably died during the final defense of Berlin. His body was never found, and, as Mr Monagan implies, “years passed” with Charlotta, Dr Grüntzig’s mother, making trips to the train station hoping to meet her husband there. Andreas and his brother were “children of the rubble” after the war. Charlotta, a teacher, struggled to support her sons by clerical work and piano instruction. The family emigrated to Argentina, where they spent 2 tense years before Charlotta’s homesickness and, perhaps, a prewar zest for the cultural past of Leipzig brought her back to the communistruled German Democratic Republic. However, Andreas’s teenage intelligence, languages, and other interests shone too brightly for the East German social engineers—they saw the fruit of class privilege gleaming from his high academic achievement at his school, the Thomas-Gymnasium. The East German regime had an official policy of placing children of working class parents in the universities, and sons and After his initial success, Dr Grüntzig’s life changed, and he championed live demonstration courses to teach the safe use of the new procedure. A book, Journey into the Heart, by science writer David Monagan, chronicles his life, work, and untimely death in a plane crash. Robert Short, BSc, summarises the life of this remarkable pioneer, largely on the basis of this biography but also with the invaluable help of Dr Grüntzig’s first wife, Michaela Grüntzig, and his coworker, Maria Schlumpf. European Perspectives in Cardiology