world Congress - Austria / II. Republic of Austria 1983 - 4 Shilling

From May 1 to 5, 1983, the 7th World Symposium for Cardiac Pacemakers took place in Vienna at the Hofburg Congress Center. International meetings on this topic have already been held twice in New York, Monaco, Groningen, Tokyo and Montreal. In 1983, 25 years had passed since the first implantation of a pacemaker. One of the focal points of this symposium was therefore a review of the achievements of this medical field. Attempts to provoke electrical shocks were made about 200 years ago. One of the first publications on experimental investigations can be found in the literature from 1804 by Aldini. His investigations were based on the well-known experiments of Luigi Galvani on the frog's thigh. Aldini attempted to achieve contraction of the heart muscle by electrical stimulation of the strand or guillotine. However, according to his report, these attempts do not seem to have been very successful. In humans, electrostimulation was first used as a therapy of cardiac arrest in 1932 by Hymann. In the late fifties, advances in electronics made it possible to manufacture implantable pacemakers. Since then, tremendous progress has been made in the field of pacemaker technology.