The historical background and the discovery of the heart defect coarctation of the aorta dates back to 1750 when Meckel gave a description of it. In 1760 J.B.Morgani wrote an article after doing an autopsy: De sedibus et causis morborum. Epist. XVIII Article 6, 1760.

Thirty one years later in 1791 the French anatomist M. Paris first described in detail the anatomic features of coarctation of the aorta: Retrecissement considerable de l'aorte pectorale observe a l'Hotel Dieu de Paris, J. Chir. de Desault 2:107, 1791.

The physician A.Meckel in a case report in 1827 wrote about the characteristics of collateral circulation and erosion of the ribs. The German doctor R. Wernicke brought attention to the pulsations and murmurs caused by the abundant collateral circulation and to the differences in the magnitude of the pulses in the upper extremities (arms) and the lower extremities (legs). The French physician Pontain in 1892 described the occurrence of hypertension (high blood pressure) in the upper extremities.

The most credit for bringing about the history of coarctation of the aorta and heart defects in general is to be given to Dr. Maude Elizabeth Seymour Abbott a Canadian pathologist and bacteriologist a pioneer in every sense of the word who collected and analyzed papers in print from 1791 to 1927 as well as autopsies she performed. She wrote the first exclusive anatomy book dealing with heart defects called An Atlas of Congenital Heart Defects that described in detail all the cases of heart defects she had seen at autopsy and the cases written about in the past.

Her Atlas describes the anatomical structures of the defects and the function of the heart, where the problems occur and what problems the birth defects cause with either the lack of blood, backflow of blood and the mixture of arterial blood with venous blood. Dr. Maude Abbott shared her studies based on the analysis of cases reported between the time of 1791 and 1927 and gave factual data concerning the clinical picture, the anatomic features and the autopsy findings as well as the causes of death in this condition.

The surgical era of correcting the heart defect coarctation of the aorta is attributed to four surgeons, Dr. Charles Crafoord and his associate Karl Gustav Vilhelm Nylin from Stockholm Sweden, and to whom many consider the father of heart surgery Robert Edward Gross and his associate C.F. Hufnagel from the United States. As the story I have been told goes Crafoord was visiting the United States and was in Boston at the Childrens hospital where Gross worked. Gross was asked to show the visiting surgeon around the hospital and his lab.

Gross invited Crafoord to his lab to show him his work on the heart defect coarctation of the aorta in which they were able to reproduce this heart defect in dogs. On October 19, 1944 Dr. Crafoord operated on a patient who had the heart defect coarctation of the aorta. On July 6,1945 Dr. Gross did the first coarctation of the aorta in the United States. Both Crafoord and Gross presented papers in 1945 on their corrections of coarctation of the aorta.

Coarctation of the aorta is a heart defect of the large artery in the heart called the aorta. It is different in children than in adults than it is in the newborn baby. The wall of the blood vessel or artery called the aorta is compressed, shriveled, narrowed or strictured. This causes a problem with the outflow of blood within the heart and blood pressure to the lower extremities of the body such as the legs, feet and toes.

There are a number of factors that make coarctation of the aorta very complex. Remember that arteries take blood away from the heart under great pressure to give life to the organs in our body and the veins return the blood after it is reoxygenated in the lungs to repeat the cycle back to the heart and to the other organs again and again.

Constrictions can occur anywhere in the aorta from the mid-point of the arch down to the bifurcation of the blood vessel. Some are found in the abdomen or in the lower thorax. About 98 percent of coarctations are located in the first part of the descending aorta beyond the aortic arch.