Tag: Cardiology
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William Harvey before King Charles I
In 1628 William Harvey published his classic work De Motu Cordis (Of the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals) demonstrating that the blood passed from the left ventricle to the capillaries at the periphery and back through the veins to the right side of the heart. He received many honors for his work, and…
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Early clinical and molecular discoveries in Long QT Syndrome
Göran WettrellSweden Sudden and unexpected death in people who are less than thirty-five years of age is associated with negative autopsy results in forty percent of cases.1 Long QT Syndrome (LQTS) is one of the most common cardiac ion channelopathies to cause sudden death in young people. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, reports…
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Human heart in Descartes’s De Homine
The famous philosopher René Descartes had an interest in physiology. But although he is known to have carried out dissections and even vivisections, he was a theoretician and not an experimentalist. In 1643 he wrote that having read William Harvey’s 1628 De Moto Cordis he agreed with the theory that the blood circulated through the…
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A quiet night
Henry BairPalo Alto, California, United States It was the end of the week, the middle of the night, and the beginning of my ER shift. All was quiet, and I was studying at the nurses’ station, still riding the high of having just aced a cardiology exam that was widely regarded as one of the…
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William Heberden on angina pectoris, 1772
“There is a disorder of the breast marked with strong and peculiar symptoms, considerable for the kind of danger belonging to it, and not extremely rare . . . The seat of it and the sense of strangling and anxiety with which it is attended, may make it not improperly be called angina pectoris. Those…
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Cecil Rhodes: The man with a hole in his heart
There must be few people in the world who can locate with confidence Northern or Southern Rhodesia on a map of Africa. Yet these countries still exist, only the names have changed. Nor would the man who founded them win a contemporary popularity contest. In fact, his statue at the University of Cape Town was…
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Jean-Baptiste de Sénac
Jean-Baptiste de Sénac (1693–1770) is believed to have studied medicine at the University of Leyden and in London. He began to practice medicine in Paris in 1723 and served as the personal physician to King Louis XV. He studied the heart in an era when cardiology was rudimentary. In 1749 he published a book on cardiology in which he described…
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Dominic Corrigan (1802–1880)
In the days when students were expected to have at least a smattering of medical history, they would have known that Corrigan’s sign and pulse were indicative of aortic regurgitation and would have guessed that Corrigan was Irish. Very few, if any, would have known about Corrigan’s cirrhosis, Corrigan’s button, or the maladie de Corrigan.1…