"But long before Thomas J. Fogarty drew such renown, he was a tinkerer - a boy growing up in Cincinnati in the 1940s, fixing things around the house for his widowed mother. He built a soap box derby car, too, and model airplanes that he sold to neighbors. He devised an automatic clutch for a friend's motor scooter."
"Fogarty, who died at 91 on Dec. 28 in Los Altos, found a solution while a student at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, from which he graduated in 1960. There, he conceived a device that would revolutionize vascular surgery - a balloon catheter that removed blood clots from patients' limbs through a minimally invasive technique that became an industry standard."
""When people had a blood clot in their arm or leg, they usually ended up having three operations," he told Stanford Medicine magazine in 2006. "Fifty percent of the patients died. I thought there must be a better way.""
Thomas J. Fogarty grew up in Cincinnati in the 1940s as a tinkerer who fixed household items, built soap box derby cars and model airplanes, and devised mechanical solutions. He started hospital work as a teenager, cleaning equipment and later serving as a scrub technician, where he witnessed high mortality from arterial blood clot operations. While a medical student at the University of Cincinnati, he fashioned a balloon from a surgical glove fingertip and attached it to a catheter using fly-tying techniques. That balloon catheter enabled minimally invasive removal of limb blood clots, became an industry standard, and is credited with saving millions of lives.
Read at The Mercury News
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