Editorial
Letter from President of the European Society for Cardiothoracic Surgery (EACTS)

Throughout my developing years, as a student and a young surgeon in England, much of Europe and its varied countries was hidden from me. For some it was because they lay behind the Iron Curtain; the rest were relatively inaccessible because of my Englishman’s failure to master other languages. As young surgeons, we all looked West to America and most of us drew our inspiration from that direction. We jokingly referred to the BTA – Been To America – as if it were another of the many degrees that the British put after their names. A hundred years ago there was little need for European surgeons to go to America to widen their experience. Medical and scientific tourism and migration were commonplace. Warsaw born Maria Skłodowska-Curie went to France and became Professor at the Sorbonne in Paris (1906) and was twice a Nobel Prize winner. Stephen Paget in The Surgery of the Chest (1896) refers to his dialogues with surgeons from a list of countries [1]. The Irishman Laurence O’Shaugnessy went to Berlin between the two European wars to study under Ferdinand Sauerbruch [2] and later died in the rout of the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk. In the years of war that followed, our scientific and medical collaborations were brutally disrupted for a second time and young surgeons like myself, in the second half of the twentieth century could do little else but look to America. Then in 1987 a group of European surgeons, men of vision and imagination, challenged our transatlantic gaze and called us to the first meeting of the European Association for Cardiothoracic Surgery (EACTS) in Vienna. We could not know then that the fall of the Berlin Wall was to follow so soon in 1989. We now can travel again, visit each others countries freely and attend international meetings to discuss our work and to learn from each other as did Paget, O’Shaugnessy and many others. Wrocław is a very appropriate city from which to consider these changes. I have studied a little about the city in preparation for this visit and learned how it is a microcosm of the cultural, political and military history of central Europe [3]. During the twentieth century thoracic surgeons have worked on one disease after another, diseases of epidemic proportions. Thoracic surgery has been through several epochs. First was tuberculosis which in a pre-antibiotic era could only be treated by surgeons. Then mitral stenosis: rheumatic fever was rife and the operation to...


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