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 In
1956, the hospital administration organized the Clinical
Investigation Unit to help push the hospital into new
areas of medicine. The Clinical Investigation Unit’s
first priority was to create a cardiac unit at St. Paul’s.
In 1959 St. Paul’s recruited Dr. Doris Kavanagh-Gray
to develop the cardiac catheterization laboratory. Kavanagh-Gray
was the first full-time specialist hired at the hospital.
 With
the invention of the heart-lung machine surgeons were
able to operate on cardiac lesions that had previously
been untreatable. The increase in surgical treatments
demanded a simultaneous increase in diagnosis, and cardiology
was pulled along in the current of surgical progress.
As Dr. Kavanagh-Gray has written, “the surgeon was
King, dragging his cardiological colleagues along —
demanding ever more precise and accurate anatomical diagnosis.”
In 1965 Dr. Dwight Peretz was hired to help
set up the Intensive Care and Cardiac Care Units, and
the cardiology unit began to grow. Since then cardiology
has grown exponentially and now includes a variety of
treatments and methods of diagnosis.
 With
the development of angioplasty, cardiology began to develop
in a new direction. Interventional cardiology allows cardiologists
to treat heart disease without having to resort to surgery.
In addition, the area of electrophysiology has also changed
the practice.
To read more about the development
of cardiology at St. Paul’s download the printable
pdf version of Spirt of Discovery
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