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Doctor Abraham Morris Rudolph is one of the most distinguished pediatric cardiologists known worldwide. He entered pediatric cardiology when the subject was still in its infancy and was present at most of its advances. He is best known for his studies on the pathophysiology of congenital heart diseases and for imaginative studies of fetal cardiovascular development and the transition to postnatal life.

Biography
Abraham Morris Rudolph was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1924. He entered medical school at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1941. During medical school, he won almost all of the prizes that students could be awarded, and he graduated summa cum laude and received his MB, BCh degree in 1946. The South African Medical Council had a regulation that forbade medical graduates from practicing medicine in or outside a hospital until they were 22 years old, so Dr Rudolph became an instructor in the Department of Anatomy until he was able to start his internship.

After the required internships of 6 months of internal medicine and 6 months of surgery, he decided to become a pediatrician and did the equivalent of his residency training at the Transvaal Memorial Hospital for Children under 2 superb clinical pediatricians, Dr Samuel Javett and Dr. Seymour Heymann.

Early career
In 1949, Dr Rudolph spent almost a year in the United Kingdom, and in that time he passed the examinations for Membership of the Royal College of Physicians of London and also the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The pass rate for first-time takers of these examinations was at that time 15%. He also spent 6 weeks with the great Scandinavian pediatric cardiologist Edgar Mannheimer. He returned to South Africa, where, in addition to gaining experience in pediatrics, he wrote a thesis on hemophilia to obtain his medical doctor degree.

United States
For personal and professional reasons, he then decided to move to the United States, and he wrote to the heads of the Departments of Pediatrics at Yale and Johns Hopkins Medical Schools and at Boston Children’s Hospital to explore the possibility of receiving additional training there. The first 2 institutions had nothing to offer him, but Dr Charles Janeway in Boston informed him that he could work either in hematology with Dr Louis K. Diamond or in cardiology with Dr Alexander S. Nadas. With Dr Rudolph’s interest in hematology, Dr Diamond was well known to him, but he had never heard of Dr Nadas. Unfortunately, neither position carried any salary. A few weeks later, Dr Janeway wrote to let Dr Rudolph know that he would be able to pay him $3000 annually to work in pediatric cardiology, so Dr Rudolph accepted this opportunity, and he and his family moved to Boston in 1951. Seldom has an investment of $3000 paid off so well.

Boston Children's Hospital
Dr Rudolph soon became head of the cardiac catheterization laboratory that, until his arrival, had only had a part-time head, Dr Walter Goodale, an adult cardiologist with an interest in congenital heart disease. He spent some time with the great physiologist Dr Clifford Barger at Harvard Medical School, and their studies of renal function in congestive heart failure resulted in several important publications on fluid retention and congestive heart failure and one on chronic catheterization of the renal artery in dogs. Dr Rudolph also set up his own experimental animal laboratory.

In his first few years in Boston, Dr Rudolph participated in a number of important clinical studies, now classics in the field, involving the use of digitalis in infants and children, pulmonic stenosis, atrial septal defect, aortic stenosis, patent ductus arteriosus, ventricular septal defect , complete atrioventricular block, tetralogy of Fallot, and transposition of the great arteries. In subsequent years, his interest in different aspects of congenital heart diseases continued, and he published many articles that have contributed to our modern understanding of these lesions. Much of his insight into congenital heart disease formed the basis of his unique book Congenital Diseases of the Heart: Clinical-Physiologic Considerations, first published in 1974 and revised in 2001 and 2009. Rudolph AM. Congenital Diseases of the Heart: Clinical-Physiological Considerations.