[3] 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) in the city of Almería (Spain),[4] Dominique Jean Larrey (1810), Henry Dalton (1891), and Daniel Hale Williams (1893).

[6][7] Surgery on the great vessels (e.g., aortic coarctation repair, Blalock–Thomas–Taussig shunt creation, closure of patent ductus arteriosus) became common after the turn of the century.

[9][10] Alfred Blalock, Helen Taussig, and Vivien Thomas performed the first successful palliative pediatric cardiac operation at Johns Hopkins Hospital on 29 November 1944, in a one-year-old girl with Tetralogy of Fallot.

[11] Their work on patient Eileen Saxon was dramatically portrayed by HBO in the 2004 television film Something The Lord Made as the birth of modern cardiac surgery.

[9][10] The first successful intracardiac correction of a congenital heart defect using hypothermia was performed by lead surgeon Dr. F. John Lewis[14][15] (Dr. C. Walton Lillehei assisted) at the University of Minnesota on 2 September 1952.

[17] Dr. Wilfred G. Bigelow of the University of Toronto found that procedures involving opening the patient's heart could be performed better in a bloodless and motionless environment.

[18] Cardiopulmonary bypass was developed after surgeons realized the limitations of hypothermia in cardiac surgery: Complex intracardiac repairs take time, and the patient needs blood flow to the body (particularly to the brain), as well as heart and lung function.

In July 1952, Forest Dodrill was the first to use a mechanical pump in a human to bypass the left side of the heart whilst allowing the patient's lungs to oxygenate the blood, in order to operate on the mitral valve.

[19] In 1953, Dr. John Heysham Gibbon of Jefferson Medical School in Philadelphia reported the first successful use of extracorporeal circulation by means of an oxygenator, but he abandoned the method after subsequent failures.

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

In these operations, the heart continues beating during surgery, but is stabilized to provide an almost still work area in which to connect a conduit vessel that bypasses a blockage.

[25] Coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG), also called revascularization, is a common surgical procedure to create an alternative path to deliver blood supply to the heart and body, with the goal of preventing clot formation.

[32][33] Recovery from open-heart surgery begins with about 48 hours in an intensive care unit, where heart rate, blood pressure, and oxygen levels are closely monitored.

It takes a number of health factors from a patient and, using precalculated logistic regression coefficients, attempts to quantify the probability that they will survive to discharge.

[45] Preoperative physical therapy may reduce postoperative pulmonary complications, such as pneumonia and atelectasis, in patients undergoing elective cardiac surgery and may decrease the length of hospital stay by more than three days on average.

There is some low certainty evidence that this perioperative blockade of beta-adrenergic receptors may reduce the incidence of atrial fibrillation and ventricular arrhythmias in patients undergoing cardiac surgery.