Whipped Cream Difficulties

Thomas Fogarty, another one of those big damn heroes of medicine.

Dr. Fogarty invented the Fogarty catheter.

“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.”
Dr. Fogarty, who died at 91 on Dec. 28 in Los Altos, Calif., 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.

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For the first balloon-catheter procedure — in 1960 or 1961, according to various accounts — Dr. John J. Cranley, a vascular surgeon who was Dr. Fogarty’s mentor, first made a small incision in an occluded artery in a patient’s leg. He inserted the catheter — with the balloon deflated — past the blood clot. The balloon was then inflated with saline solution and retracted, pulling the clot along with it.
His response was, “Holy Cow!,” Dr. Fogarty told the publication Endovascular Today in 2004. Dr. Cranley exclaimed, “Wow, this really works!

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Six-plus decades after its invention, the Fogarty catheter is used hundreds of thousands of times a year around the world in vascular, cardiac and thoracic surgeries. According to the American College of Surgeons and Fogarty Innovation, a nonprofit he founded, it remains the most widely used catheter for removal of blood clots and is credited with having saved an estimated 20 million lives globally.

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In a video tribute on his 90th birthday in 2024, colleagues at Fogarty Innovation described him as unconventional, stubborn and “about as touchy-feely as a steel screw.” Colleagues also paraphrased the mantra that drove Dr. Fogarty’s career: “How can I make this better? How can I reduce pain? How can I get the patient out of the hospital more quickly?”
At the same time, Andrew Cleeland, the organization’s chief executive, said in an interview that Dr. Fogarty had been a prankster who didn’t always take himself so seriously. Thomas Fogarty Jr. added that his father “wouldn’t tolerate foolishness except foolishness of the highest quality; well into his 80s, nothing was funnier to him than a whoopee cushion.”

He was also a fly fisherman.

During medical school, he experimented in his attic by cutting the pinkie finger from a surgical glove to use as a balloon, and then attaching it to a urethral catheter by using fly-tying techniques. He had learned to tie fly knots as a boy, when he would fish, at least part of the time, in a cemetery pond.

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