Werner Forssmann, a surgeon and urologist, was relatively unknown in his native Germany when he won the Nobel Prize in 1956 for his work in heart catheterization. His ground-breaking experiment had been done almost three decades earlier, and when he received word of the award--after a morning of surgery during which he had operated on three patients with kidney disease--he commented, as quoted in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, "I feel like a village parson who has just learned that he has been made bishop."

Werner Theodor Otto Forssmann was born on August 29, 1904, in Berlin, the only child of Julius Forssmann, a lawyer employed by a life insurance company, and Emmy Hindenberg. Forssmann's father died in World War I while young Forssmann was still a student in the Askanische Gymnasium, a school emphasizing a humanistic approach to education. His mother worked as an office clerk and his grandmother took over the...