Cardiovascular surgery as a single specialty: The case to unify cardiac and vascular surgery

摘要

Cardiovascular surgery came of age in the 20th century. Carrel, in the first decade, described an end-to-end suture technique to connect blood vessels, which launched vascular surgery. Gibbon in 1953 first used a heart-lung machine clinically, which launched cardiac surgery. Cardiovascular deaths in the United States have led all others every year of the 20th century except 1918, the year of the influenza epidemic.By the end of the 20th century, cardiovascular surgery was formally separated into two different disciplines, cardiac surgery and vascular surgery. Cardiac surgery is paired with general thoracic surgery as part of the specialty, thoracic surgery, which became a primary board specialty in 1971. Vascular surgery more recently emerged as a surgical specialty, first by establishing its own residency programs and later by gaining approval for a primary certificate in vascular surgery by the American Board of Surgery . Both cardiac and vascular surgery address disorders of the circulation. In my opinion, they are unnaturally separated and should be unified into one specialty.