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II.5 - Concepts of Heart-Related Diseases

from Part II - Changing Concepts of Health and Disease

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Joel D. Howell
Edited by
Kenneth F. Kiple
Kenneth F. Kiple
Affiliation:
Bowling Green State University, Ohio
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Summary

In 1628 William Harvey, physician to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, used quantitative, experimental methods to show that the blood must move in a circle, rather than being continuously regenerated as earlier theories had proposed. In addition, Harvey showed that the heart supplies the power to send the blood on its circuit around the body. Harvey’s revolutionary ideas reflected ancient thought about the perfectibility of circular motion as much as they did new ideas about the value of experimental evidence. Nonetheless, in many ways and by most accounts, the year 1628 marks the beginning of current Western ways of looking at the heart and its diseases. However, although Harvey’s demonstration of cardiac physiology in animals seemed logically applicable to human beings, it failed to lead immediately to any dramatic changes in the diagnosis or treatment of human heart disease. Over the next few centuries many people tried to discover what was going on within the thoraxes of patients who showed the debilitating signs of cardiac disease. Their notions about heart disease were reflected in the diagnostic techniques they thought appropriate.

Diagnosing Heart Disease

Physical Diagnosis

During the mid-eighteenth century, Leopold Auenbrugger, working in Vienna, described a new diagnostic technique. By percussing the chest – that is, by striking the chest and both listening to and feeling the reverberation – he was able to tell, to some extent, what lay within. His method enabled him to ascertain the size of the heart and to determine the presence of fluid in the chest, a common manifestation of heart failure.

Type
Chapter
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The Cambridge World History of Human Disease , pp. 91 - 102
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1993

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