Historical Background The first surgeon to repair a thoracoabdominal aortic aneurysm (TAAA) was Etheredge in 1955 in a patient with a Type IV TAAA using a homograft. In 1956 DeBakey and associates reported the surgical treatment of four patients with…
Historical Background Subclavian-axillary vein thrombosis, also referred to as Paget-Schroetter syndrome or “effort thrombosis,” refers to primary thrombosis of the subclavian vein at the costoclavicular junction. Primary subclavian-axillary vein thrombosis is relatively rare, with a yearly incidence in the United…
Historical Background The first anatomic descriptions of the thoracic outlet can be traced to 150 ad when Galen identified the presence of a cervical rib in human dissections. However, it was not until 1742 that Hunauld established the association between…
Historical Background Thoracic outlet syndrome (TOS) is recognized to encompass three conditions: (1) neurogenic TOS, caused by compression of the brachial plexus nerve roots within the scalene triangle, subcoracoid space, or both; (2) venous TOS, caused by compression of the…
Historical Background Although arterial compression represents the least common type of thoracic outlet syndrome, developmental anomalies of the thoracic outlet were probably first recognized in patients with arterial complications. As early as the second century Galen and Vesalius described arterial…
Historical Background Shimizu and Sano first described surgical repair of an atherosclerotic aortic arch branch vessel lesion in 1951. Initially, open surgical repair was performed via a transthoracic approach, but this was replaced by the more popular extraanatomic bypass after…
Historical Background Savory was the first to describe a patient with signs and symptoms suggesting occlusive disease involving the aortic arch vessels. Nearly 20 years later, in 1875, Broadbent chronicled a patient who while living had no radial pulses and…
Historical Background Surgical approaches to the aortic arch vessels had been described in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1958 DeBakey and associates described the first successful surgical reconstruction of an occluded symptomatic innominate artery using an nylon…
Historical Background Reconstruction of the subclavian arteries via thromboendarterectomy was first described by Cate and Scott in 1957 and a year later, Crawford, DeBakey, and Fields described the technique of transsubclavian endarterectomy of the vertebral artery. In 1964 Parrott introduced…
Historical Background Reigner performed the first carotid body tumor (CBT) resection in 1880, though the patient did not survive. In 1889 Albert became the first to excise a CBT without cranial nerve or carotid artery injury, and Scudder was the…