The Montreal Heart Institute: the idea and the man behind it.

The Montreal Heart Institute (MHI) opened on January 11, 1954. It was the work of a single individual, a young cardiologist with a vision. Paul David (1919-1999) trained in the late 1940s -- first, in Boston with Paul Dudley White and, second, in Paris with Jean Lenègre, two of the well-known cardiologists of the times. In the early 1950s, the only heart institute in the world was the one that Ignacio Chavez had founded in Mexico in 1944. Montreal had a medical institute of its own, the Montreal Neurological Institute, which Wilder Penfield had established in 1934. David probably got his inspiration from these two institutions. Two events also coincided somewhat at the time. In 1950, David attended the first meeting of the International Society of Cardiology in Paris where Alfred Blalock presented his experience with his operation for blue babies and Charles Bailey discussed valvular commissurotomy for mitral stenosis. Shortly after he returned from France, David was approached by the Sisters of Charity to lead the cardiology division of a new hospital under construction in Montreal. The young man, barely out of residency, insisted on having a full floor of the hospital to himself with complete administrative independence from the main hospital. He also indicated that he would call the place a Heart Institute, no less. The nuns took him seriously and, after two or three encounters, agreed with his requests, perhaps much to his surprise. The rest, as they say, is history.