Ultrasound in Lund – three world premieres

In the historical section of the monograph Ultrasound in Medical Diagnosis, printed in 1976, one can read that a substantial part of the early development of the ultrasound-echo method took place in the little university town of Lund in Sweden. It is not without pride that the lundensians Inge Edler and Hellmuth Hertz comment upon this in a later review article. They also describe what happened in Lund in the 1950s which they thought contributed in a decisive way to diagnostics in cardiology, neurosurgery and obstetrics and gynaecology. Apart from the cardiologist Edler and the physicist Hertz the pioneers were the neurosurgeon Lars Leksell and the obstetrician Bertil Sunden. Hertz and his pupils were to a high degree responsible for the technical development and the application in all three specialities.