In 1833, Dominic Corrigan, a British physician, first described the visible abrupt distention and collapse of carotid arteries in patients with aortic insufficiency.
Later, surgical intervention to relieve atherosclerotic obstruction of the carotid arteries was successfully performed by Dr. Michael DeBakey in 1953 for the first time, at the Methodist Hospital in Houston, TX.
In 1971, C. Miller Fisher, a Canadian neurologist and stroke physician working at Massachusetts General Hospital, first noted the "string sign" abnormality in carotid arteries on cerebral angiograms of stroke patients, and subsequently discovered that the same abnormality could occur in the vertebral arteries.