The legacy of Argentine surgeon Rene Favaloro is being remembered by a Google Doodle today on what would have been his 96th birthday.
A Buenos Aires native, Favaloro was best known for his pioneering work in coronary bypass surgery, and was the first surgeon to perform the procedure successfully.
Here’s what you need to know:
Who was Rene Favaloro?
Rene Favaloro was born in 1923 in La Plata, Argentina and went on to earn a degree in medicine from the National University of La Palta in 1948.
He worked as a doctor in his home country for a time before moving to the US to study thoracic and cardiovascular surgery at the Cleveland Clinic.
While working at the clinic, Favaloro successfully performed bypass surgery on a 51-year-old woman, conducting a procedure which involved hooking the patient to an artificial heart-lung machine, removing saphenous vein from her leg and using the vein to form a bypass around blockages in her heart.
Favaloro returned to Argentina in 1972, where he would later found his own medical institution, the Favaloro Foundation.
He committed suicide on July 29, 2000.
Why is he being honoured with a Google Doodle?
Whilst Favaloro himself was reluctant to be known as the “father” of coronary bypass surgery, his work played a fundamental role in introducing the procedure into the clinical arena.
Of his legacy, Favaloro wrote: “’We’ is more important than ‘I.’ In medicine, the advances are always the result of many efforts accumulated over the years.”
Today, the Favaloro Foundation serves patients based on their medical needs rather than their ability to pay and tecaches Dr Favaloro’s innovative techniques to doctors all over Latin America.
