[citation needed] Historically, cardiac surgeons in Canada completed general surgery followed by a fellowship in CV / CT / CVT.

The earliest operations on the pericardium (the sac that surrounds the heart) took place in the 19th century and were performed by Francisco Romero (1801)[4] Dominique Jean Larrey, Henry Dalton, and Daniel Hale Williams.

The patient awoke and seemed fine for 24 hours, but became ill with increasing temperature and he ultimately died from what the post mortem proved to be mediastinitis on the third postoperative day.

[6][7] The first successful surgery of the heart, performed without any complications, was by Ludwig Rehn of Frankfurt, Germany, who repaired a stab wound to the right ventricle on September 7, 1896.

He made an opening in the appendage of the left atrium and inserted a finger into this chamber in order to palpate and explore the damaged mitral valve.

The patient survived for several years[10] but Souttar's physician colleagues at that time decided the procedure was not justified and he could not continue.

Horace Smithy (1914–1948) revived an operation due to Dr Dwight Harken of the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital using a punch to remove a portion of the mitral valve.

It was discovered by Wilfred G. Bigelow of the University of Toronto that the repair of intracardiac pathologies was better done with a bloodless and motionless environment, which means that the heart should be stopped and drained of blood.

The first successful intracardiac correction of a congenital heart defect using hypothermia was performed by C. Walton Lillehei and F. John Lewis at the University of Minnesota on September 2, 1952.

The following year, Soviet surgeon Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Vishnevskiy conducted the first cardiac surgery under local anesthesia.

John Heysham Gibbon at Jefferson Medical School in Philadelphia reported in 1953 the first successful use of extracorporeal circulation by means of an oxygenator, but he abandoned the method, disappointed by subsequent failures.

John W. Kirklin at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota started using a Gibbon type pump-oxygenator in a series of successful operations, and was soon followed by surgeons in various parts of the world.

[citation needed] Nazih Zuhdi performed the first total intentional hemodilution open heart surgery on Terry Gene Nix, age 7, on February 25, 1960, at Mercy Hospital, Oklahoma City, OK.

[13] In March, 1961, Zuhdi, Carey, and Greer, performed open heart surgery on a child, age 3+1⁄2, using the total intentional hemodilution machine.

[16] In December 2024, the first robotic surgery for a combined robotic aortic valve replacement (AVR) and coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) was successfully performed through one small incision at West Virginia University, led by surgeon Vinay Badhwar, who is the executive chair of the WVU Heart and Vascular Institute and a vice president of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons.

Among them was an open repair of an atrial septal defect using hypothermia, inflow occlusion and direct vision in a 5-year-old child performed in 1952 by Lewis and Tauffe.

C. Walter Lillihei used cross-circulation between a boy and his father to maintain perfusion while performing a direct repair of a ventricular septal defect in a 4-year-old child in 1954.

In the long-run, pediatric cardiovascular surgery would rely on the cardiopulmonary bypass machine developed by Gibbon and Lillehei as noted above.

This takes a number of health factors from a patient and using precalculated logistic regression coefficients attempts to give a percentage chance of survival to discharge.

[citation needed] Lung volume reduction surgery, or LVRS, can improve the quality of life for certain patients with COPD of emphysematous type, when other treatment options are not enough.

This is a surgical option involving a mini-thoracotomy for patients in end stage COPD due to underlying emphysema, and can improve lung elastic recoil as well as diaphragmatic function.

[33] Possible complications of LVRS include prolonged air leak (mean duration post surgery until all chest tubes removed is 10.9 ± 8.0 days.

If there is no evidence of undue shortness of breath or diffuse parenchymal lung disease, and the FEV1 exceeds 2 litres or 80% of predicted, the person is fit for pneumonectomy.

[44][45] The use of surgical sealants may reduce the incidence of prolonged air leaks, however, this intervention alone has not been shown to results in a decreased length of hospital stay following lung cancer surgery.

[46] There is no strong evidence to support using non-invasive positive pressure ventilation following lung cancer surgery to reduce pulmonary complications.