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History Of Autopsies
And Heart Disease
Life Flow One
The Solution For Heart Disease

by
Karl Loren

How would you like to carve up this heart?

Thousands of physicians, even in the 1800s, did just this!

The claim is often made by doctors and heart research scientists that ancient man suffered from heart disease just as much as modern man -- that the diet in ancient days (heavy intake of eggs, butter, fat, meat) led to just as much heart disease then as it does now, BUT that the deaths from heart disease in ancient times were not understood.

The theory is that doctors, in the 1800's for instance, did not understand heart disease enough to recognize it when someone died.  If that were accepted as true, then the current well-known death rate from heart disease could be claimed to have always been with us, and always caused by the high-cholesterol diet of ancient man as well as modern man.

This is proven to be false.  Particularly back in the 1800s when the death certificates showed almost ZERO deaths from heart disease and when the census statistics on "cause of death" did not even include "heart disease" as a category -- back in those years autopsies were performed on probably more people than even today.

Medical science, in the 1800s, was largely based on what scientists could discover through autopsies.  Autopsies were the most common form of medical research and medical education.  Virtually every dead body was an opportunity for some doctor to do some carving, looking and learning about the cause of death.  (In fact this predisposition to study dead bodies gives rise to the common complaint about doctors today -- that they spend too little time on prevention and advising you how to become healthy -- and too much time on trying to "cure" a disease, or prevent death!

The question, then, is were these doctors so completely unaware of the signs of heart disease that they could not identify them in the millions of dead bodies they examined over a very long period of time?

Here is one study, University of Connecticut School of Medicine, that provides some insight into this question.

Note that this study simply alludes to the common knowledge of autopsies performed in the 17th Century, during the time of "Harvey."  So, in the 1600s it was well understood that autopsies were the standard method of medical research and education.

It was Harvey, in the 1600s, who first announced the function of the heart and wrote about autopsies where the heart was examined.  The sections in blue, below, are taken from the study reprinted further below.

So, in the 1600's we have the following:

Harvey demonstrated that the heart was a pump and autopsy descriptions revealed valve abnormalities that interfered with the circulation, that it became possible to identify the role of heart disease in causing shortness of breath and edema.

Then, by the time of the 18th century:

Morgagni's recognition, toward the end of the eighteenth century, that overload caused the heart to enlarge was followed less than 50 years later by Corvisart's distinction between hypertrophy and dilation.

The above medical observations were certainly very aware of abnormalities in and around the heart.

Then, later, as long ago as the 19th century, we have:

Differences in the architecture of failing hearts focused attention of nineteenth-century clinical scientists on the myocardial response to overload, and by the end of this century overload-induced hypertrophy was recognized not only to have immediate adaptive effects, but also to cause progressive degeneration of the heart muscle.

Finally at the end of the 19th century, and the very beginning of the current century, we have:

This focus on the failing myocardium ended in the early years of the twentieth century, when new discoveries in hemodynamic physiology shifted attention to pressure and flow abnormalities caused by the then prevalent rheumatic valvular heart disease.

All the above observations about various observations, based on autopsies, of heart related problems would lead one to believe that the scientists of those times were extremely active in DOING autopsies and were very aware of various findings of abnormal heart form and shape, function and condition.  While heart disease was not common enough during these hundreds of years to constitute a major form of death, this type of disease was also not rare enough to be completely unnoticed.

There were millions of autopsies performed during these hundreds of years.  Many (but, certainly not millions) of these autopsies reported on heart disease symptoms.  Heart disease was noticed but not in large quantity.

The thrust of this study is that early physicians SAW the various physical problems connected with the heart -- but they did not understand the origin of those problems and had no idea of how to treat those problems.  Physicians of today are in no better position on these vital matters.

Here is what the study concludes:

This article reviews some of the misconceptions and errors of early physicians, who, while often careful and intelligent observers, lacked the means to explain and treat heart failure.

They may have lacked the means to explain and treat heart failure, but they did not lack the knowledge and skill to detect the problem.

So, we can safely conclude that medical doctors have had the ability, over hundreds of years, to detect and identify heart disease and the related symptoms.  The fact is that this form of death was not found to be statistically significant, even though it was well recognized as being in existence.

Modern doctors who claim that heart disease has always been the number one killer, in the 1800s as well as now, and that it was not listed as the cause of death because it was not recognized in the 1800s -- these people are proven false by the large number of autopsies that were done during this period and which saw enough (rare) heart abnormalities to remark about them, but not enough of them to announce that a large number of all deaths were caused by this problem.

Modern doctors, then, have created a false history of the past -- claiming that ancient researchers had no knowledge of something which historical study shows they knew quite well.

Record from database: MEDLINE

Title

Evolving concepts of heart failure: cooling furnace, malfunctioning pump, enlarging muscle--Part I.

Author

Katz AM

Address

Cardiology Division, University of Connecticut School of Medicine, Farmington 06030-1305, USA.

Source

J Card Fail, 1997 Dec, 3:4, 319-34

Abstract

Understanding of the causes of dyspnea and anasarca, the cardinal features of heart failure, has changed dramatically since Greco-Roman times, when sputum and pleural effusions were thought to originate in the brain, and the heart was believed to heat and distribute the vital spirit. It was not until the seventeenth century, when Harvey demonstrated that the heart was a pump and autopsy descriptions revealed valve abnormalities that interfered with the circulation, that it became possible to identify the role of heart disease in causing shortness of breath and edema. Morgagni's recognition, toward the end of the eighteenth century, that overload caused the heart to enlarge was followed less than 50 years later by Corvisart's distinction between hypertrophy and dilation. Differences in the architecture of failing hearts focused attention of nineteenth-century clinical scientists on the myocardial response to overload, and by the end of this century overload-induced hypertrophy was recognized not only to have immediate adaptive effects, but also to cause progressive degeneration of the heart muscle. This focus on the failing myocardium ended in the early years of the twentieth century, when new discoveries in hemodynamic physiology shifted attention to pressure and flow abnormalities caused by the then prevalent rheumatic valvular heart disease. During the past decade, new emphasis on prognosis, along with realization that drugs intended to correct hemodynamic abnormalities often had adverse effects on survival, has led to a reexamination of the biology of the failing heart. As a result, the focus in heart failure research has returned to the myocardium. This article reviews some of the misconceptions and errors of early physicians, who, while often careful and intelligent observers, lacked the means to explain and treat heart failure. It is hoped an appreciation of the evolving concepts of heart failure will help the reader meet today's challenge of incorporating new information from molecular biology that holds the key to further progress in understanding the causes and therapy of this syndrome.

Language of Publication

English

Unique Identifier

98208663