This series of programmes is all about how war has improved all of our lives. And this programme’s all about how modern heart surgery happened thanks to war and because of one man’s struggle to overcome what, up to and during World War II, was an area of surgery that no right thinking surgeon would do. Heart surgery.

The heart’s an incredible pumping machine. It’s the size of a grapefruit, it beats slightly more than once a second, 100,000 times a day. Depending on how long you live, it can have up to 3.5 billion beats in a lifetime. Your heart pumps out blood with enormous force. If your aorta is severed your heart will send a fountain of blood 3 metres up into the air.

It was only during World War II, and because of one remarkable man, that surgeons began to perform surgery on the heart. Until then it had been a no-go area. After the war, heart surgery was revolutionised.

This is an amazing story.

Tag words: heart surgery; World War II; President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; Joseph Stalin; Winston Churchill; Dwight E Harken; US Army Medical Corps; defribillator; intra-aortic ballon pump; pacemaker; Werner Forssmann; National Socialist Party; Adolf Hitler; Nazi Party; National Socialist German Physicians’ League; Leonard Hayflick;