Thomas J. Fogarty

Who is Thomas J. Fogarty?

Dr. Thomas J. Fogarty is an American surgeon and inventor of the embolectomy catheter. Before his invention the success rate for removing an embolus, or blood clot, was forty to fifty percent. In 1965, Dr. Thomas Fogarty published an article describing "a new method for extraction of arterial emboli and thrombi."

The balloon embolectomy catheter was used on a human patient for the first time six weeks after Fogarty came up with the idea in 1961. Today, using only local anesthesia, the procedure only takes about an hour.

Fogarty’s inventions and the many others that resulted from his original embolectomy catheter heavily influenced the way surgery was performed. When asked about the time the impact his invention had on the field, he says, "I had no concept that [non-invasive surgery] would reach the magnitude that it has." As a result of the invention, Dr. Fogarty, still alive today, went on to win many prizes and patent over sixty inventions.