RT Book, Section A1 Loberman, Dan A1 Pirundini, Paul A. A1 Byrne, John G. A1 Cohn, Lawrence H. A2 Cohn, Lawrence H. A2 Adams, David H. SR Print(0) ID 1144165044 T1 Mitral Valve Repair T2 Cardiac Surgery in the Adult, 5e YR 2017 FD 2017 PB McGraw-Hill Education PP New York, NY SN 9780071844871 LK accesscardiology.mhmedical.com/content.aspx?aid=1144165044 RD 2024/10/12 AB It can be reasonably argued that the very dawn of cardiac surgery began with a mitral valve repair. On May 20, 1923, Dr Elliot Carr Cutler (Fig. 35-1) performed the world’s first successful mitral valve repair at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.1 Dr Cutler carried out a transventricular mitral valve commissurotomy with a neurosurgical tenotomy knife on a critically ill 12-year-old girl. His choice of instrument was likely influenced by Dr Harvey Cushing who was surgeon-in-chief at the time. A new era in surgery was introduced as well as the reality of mitral valve repair.2 Cutler had worked assiduously on this problem in the Surgical Research Laboratories of Harvard Medical School before turning his attention to this critically ill patient. Subsequent attempts at this operation using a device to cut out a segment of the diseased mitral valve resulted in several deaths from massive mitral regurgitation and Cutler eventually abandoned the procedure.3 Of Cutler’s contemporaries, Henry Souttar of England performed a single successful transatrial finger commissurotomy in 1925, but received no further referrals.4 After Souttar, there remained little activity in mitral valve repair until the 1940s when Dwight Harken, then the Chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, published his groundbreaking series of valvuloplasty patients for mitral stenosis.5 Dr Charles Bailey of Philadelphia also published a concomitant series of a similar large group of patients.6