Tag: Spring 2013
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Willem Einthoven and the string galvanometer
Philip R. LiebsonChicago, Illinois, United States “I do not imagine that electrocardiography is likely to find very extensive use in the hospital . . . It can at most be of rare and occasional use to afford a record of some anomaly of cardiac action.”—Augustus D. Waller, 1911 Perhaps the earliest technical device that was…
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William Harvey
Philip R. LiebsonChicago, Illinois, United States The impression that William Harvey (1578-1657) discovered the closed circulation of the blood is not entirely accurate, although after Harvey there was never any doubt about it. Regardless of what credit you ascribe to him, it is clear that his research benefited from more than two thousand years of…
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René Théophile Hyacinthe Laënnec and the stethoscope
Philip R. LiebsonChicago, Illinois, United States What constitutes a high-tech instrument? Obviously, in the field of medicine, one that has been developed to improve evaluation of a given condition and lead to a more specific diagnosis. In the early 19th century, there was little that could be considered high-tech in medicine in regard to instrumentation.…
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Coronary heart disease
Matko MarusicCroatiaTranslated by Dalibora Behmen Heart attack One night, Ivo felt a strong pressure in his chest. It was followed by fear and panic. He knew at once what had caused this catastrophe, and spoke of it dispassionately and with the technical precision of an engineer who is sick. The cause was the choke in…
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Andreas Roland Gruentzig
Mahesh RajuChicago, Illinois, United States Andreas Roland Gruentzig was born at the start of World War II on June 25, 1939 in Dresden, Germany.1 His mother, Charlotta, raised both him and his older brother after their father had failed to return from the war. His mother, a teacher, had difficulty supporting her family while living…
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Raymond de Vieussens
Jeremy ParkerChicago, Illinois, United States Raymond de Vieussens, the great French physician and pioneer of anatomic work in neurology and cardiology, was born in the village of Vieussens in Rouvergue (c.1635-1641). His father, a lieutenant colonel in the French army, was possibly a bourgeois of Vigan.1,2 Little is known about Vieussens’ upbringing, except that he…
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Graham Steell of the murmur
To be remembered for a cardiac murmur is better than not to be remembered at all, at least in the eyes of those seeking immortality for their works on this earth. But as so often happens in such cases, the murmur eponymously linked to the name Graham Steell had been described even earlier by his…
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Clifford Allbutt
Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt (1836-1925) was an immensely influential British physician who spanned the transition from Victorian to modern medicine, a Renaissance man who helped advance our understanding of disease in many different areas. He is especially remembered for his work on hypertension and cardiac disease, writing as he was at a time when it…
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Sir Thomas Lewis: The promise of electrocardiography
In republishing an account of clinical electrocardiography, I do so from conviction that this method of examination is essential to the modern study of heart disease. When some twenty-seven years ago I began to study disorders of the heart with the aid of the “string galvanometer” the method was in its early infancy and unknown…