Biography

Doris Escher was born in New York City in 1917, attended Barnard College and then New York University College of Medicine from which she graduated in 1942. She interned at Montefiore Hospital and was a medical resident at the Jewish Hospital of Brooklyn. While she was a Fellow in Medicine and Physiology at NYU she trained in renal function research with Homer Smith and with Andre Cournand in the laboratory where he was an inventor of cardiac catheterization. She was then a Medical Research Fellow at Montefiore and in 1950 was appointed Physician in Charge of the Cardiac Catheterization Unit at Montefiore, remaining in that position until 1984.

Dr. Escher's knowledge of cardiac catheterization and assessment of cardiac and renal function led to ground-breaking discoveries. Additionally, she oversaw clinical studies of patients with acquired valvular and congenital cardiac disease who underwent closed and later open heart surgery after 1958, when cardiac catheterization, and Escher herself, became even more central to the cardiac surgical program.

Dr. Escher was a Senior Physician in the Departments of Medicine and Radiology at Montefiore, a consultant at several regional hospitals, Professor of Medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and the director of the Cardiology Training Program at Montefiore until 1984. She was Principal Investigator of a US Public Health Service grant, "Artifically Paced Heart: Technology, Physiology", between 1959 and 1979, and Co-Principal Investigator of three other USPHS grants. After the world's first successful transvenous cardiac pacemaker was inserted in her laboratory on July 16, 1958, it became the site of demonstration of the long-term success of transvenous cardiac pacing, with 25 patients being paced successfully by 1960, including several who survived 20 years with transvenous pacing only.

A prolific author, Dr. Escher published 125 papers and 117 abstracts in the medical literature and was co-author of the first American book on cardiac pacing, Principles and Techniques of Cardiac Pacing, published in 1970. She has lectured locally, nationally and internationally at medical symposia throughout the world. As a long time member of the American College of Cardiology and of its Pacemaking Committee from 1978-1984, she was Co-Director of a series of extramural continuing medical educational conferences between 1973 and 1988. She was president of NASPE in 1988 and has been named a permanent Honorary Member of its Board of Trustees. She has been a member of the Board of Directors of the New York Cardiological Society since 1976 and served as its president in 1984-85. She is a member of many national and international medical organizations and continues in the active practice of cardiology at Montefiore Medical Center in Bronx, New York.

Interview Excerpts

Technical innovations in her early cath lab (1:58 seconds)

Working with children with heart conditions (58 seconds)

Importance of doing exercise tests on patients (1:26 seconds)

Early treatments for congestive heart failure (2:15 seconds)

Manifold design (48 seconds)

Early use of microelectronics in the lab (1:23 seconds)

Being a woman in medicine (5:19 seconds)

Dangers and trials of her early practice (1:18 seconds)

Innovative techniques to map catheters in the heart (1:23 seconds)

Early techniques of using transseptals (1:57 seconds)

Cost effectiveness and technical innovation in early cath lab (3:16 seconds)

Problems with early lab design (3:17 seconds)

Early design of heart catheters (2:23 seconds)

Early work with machines in cath lab (5:23 seconds)

Early pitfalls of working in lab (48 seconds)

Proudest moments as pioneer in cardiac research (2:05 seconds)

Fond memories of early cath lab (3:51 seconds)

Great strides with primitive equipment and conditions in the lab (4:32 seconds)

Working around construction in the lab (1:31 seconds)

Unorthodox methods for establishing proper lab (2:14 seconds)

Excerpted from this interview:
Interviewer: Seymour Furman, MD
Date: February 6, 1996
Place: Cerromar Beach, Puerto Rico
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