In 1929 Werner Forßmann, a young assistant surgeon in Eberswalde, pushed a catheter into his own heart. His chief had forbidden the experiment. Soon afterward the surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch dismissed him from the Charité in Berlin. Forßmann later remembered Sauerbruch’s words: Mit solchen Kunststücken habilitiert man sich in einem Zirkus und nicht an einer anständigen deutschen Klinik. With such stunts you qualify as a professor in a circus, not at a decent German clinic. Forßmann’s accounts of these events varied over the years. In 1956 he shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine for heart catheterization.