The beginning of cardiac surgery is generally considered to be the successful repair of a wound of the heart that took place on the 7th of September 1896 in Frankfurt am Main. This operation put an end to the widespread belief that nature had set the heart beyond the limits of surgery. The successive development of heart surgery moved together with other advances that were rapidly taking place in various fields of medicine and surgery and which, already in the first half of the 20th century, had allowed surgical pioneers to successfully correct a number of congenital and acquired heart...