The evolution of cardiac care for children in Washington, DC.

Abstract

Cardiac surgery for CHD was pioneered in Washington, DC by Charles Hufnagel and Edgar Davis working at Georgetown University and Children's Hospital of the District of Columbia. Children's Hospital, now Children's National Hospital, had been established just 5 years after the end of the Civil War. In the 1950s, Davis and Hufnagel undertook many open-heart operations using the technique of surface cooling, hypothermia, and circulatory arrest. Hufnagel and Lewis Scott, who founded the cardiology department at Children's, were trained in Boston by Gross and Nadas. Judson Randolph, also a trainee of Gross, introduced cardiac surgery using cardiopulmonary bypass and established the General Pediatric Surgery department at Children's in the 1960s. The transition of hospital staffing from community-based private physicians to full-time hospital employees was often controversial but was complete by the turn of the millennium. The 21st century has seen continuing growth of the new Children's National Heart Institute and consolidation of several congenital cardiac programmes in Washington, DC.