Adib Jatene, an immense legacy to Brazilian medicine.

November 14, 2014, will be marked forever in the history of Brazil as the day that the national medicine lost one of its greatest references: cardiologist Adib Jatene. Born in Xapuri, Acre, son of a Lebanese rubber tapper, he wrote one of the finest chapters in the history of Brazilian medicine. With a medical degree from University of São Paulo’s Faculty of Medicine (FMUSP), awarded in 1953, where he also became professor emeritus, he accumulated positions at Hospital do Coração (HCor) and Instituto Dante Pazzanese, two national references in cardiology. Jatene was a pioneer of heart surgery in the country. In addition to having created the first artificial lung-heart machine at Hospital das Clínicas, in the 1950s, he was responsible for the first bypass surgery in Brazil in 1968. His contributions in favor of techniques for the development of cardiology put his name among the most respected cardiac surgeons in the world. One of the procedures developed by him to correct transposed arteries in neonates became known worldwide as “Jatene’s surgery”, adding up to an impressive history of more than 20,000 operations and nearly 700 scientific papers published in the national and international literature as author or co-author. One of them, related to the intracavitary correction technique and published in The Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, reached, in the medical literature only, over 400 citations.