Aortic Surgery in Turin

It is hard to establish the date of birth of modern vascular surgery as we mean it today, but it is relatively easier to recall some of the milestones by which this important branch of surgery evolved. As the purpose of this book is only aortic surgery, we can point out some dates1: in 1951 Norman Foster first, and Charles Dubost two months later, performed the first aortic repair for aneurysm, with an iliac vein and a homograft respectively; in 1953, D.A. Cooley and M.E. DeBakey repaired a descending thoracic aorta; in 1954, M.E. DeBakey carried out an abdominal aortic repair using a Dacron graft and S.N. Etheredge repaired a supraceliac aortic aneurysm with a homograft through a thoraco-phrenolaparotomy; in 1955, C. Rob of England was acknowledged as the first to operate on a thoraco-abdominal aortic aneurysm. It was only in 1986, however, that E.S. Crawford and colleagues published a fundamental work describing a casuistry of 605 patients treated for different thoraco-abdominal aneurysms in the last 20 years; in this paper, they introduced a new classification of thoraco-abdominal aortic aneurysm which is still known today as ???Crawford???s classification???. A milestone in non-aneurysmatic aortic diseases was the aorto-iliac thromboendarterectomy, which was firstly performed by J. Wylie in 1952 for a steno-occlusive syndrome described by R. Leriche in 1940. Given this brief excursus, it is not historically doubted that, at least in the early years, modern vascular surgery was almost a prerogative of Anglo-American and French surgeons.