ACCIDENTAL MEDICINE

MEDICAL breakthroughs discovered by accident. This week: Heart scans U.S. HEART surgeon F. Mason Sones thought a mistake during surgery had killed his patient — in fact, he’d invented a lifesaving diagnostic procedure.

In 1958, Dr Sones’s team accidentally injected a large quantity of dye directly into a patient’s heart — it was only meant to have gone into the surrounding arteries.

Dr Sones later told how he ran around looking for a scalpel to open the chest to clear the dye manually. But, to his relief, he found not only did the dye not kill the patient, it made it easier to identify any blockages affecting the heart.

He went on to develop cardiac catheterisation. Here, a flexible tube is inserted into the coronary arteries and a small amount of dye, visible on an X-ray, is injected to reveal their state.