Galen: The First Cardiac Surgeon?

It is widely believed that the first and the second pericardium surgeries were done in the nineteenth century by Francisco Romero and Dominique Jean Larrey, respectively; however, Galen was the first surgeon who proceeded with pericardiectomy. This ancient case report of sternum osteomyelitis and pericardiectomy illuminates some dark part of the history of medicine and the ability of physicians in that era.

Husbands' Hearts and Women's Health: Gender, Age, and Heart Disease in Twentieth-Century America.

The medical community and broader public have historically focused on heart disease as a concern for men, even though it has been the leading cause of death in women for decades. Through an analysis of medical publications, women's health literature, and mainstream media, this article traces the interactions of gender and age on perceptions of heart disease during the twentieth century. I argue that attention to middle-age mortality rates accentuated men's susceptibility to heart disease over women's, even as these differences diminished at older ages, when the majority of deaths occurred. Age and gender biases combined to frame heart disease as a man's disease on one hand, while the women's health movement marginalized older women's health on the other. It was not until the following decades that older women began to attract clinical concern and greater public attention, which ultimately expanded narrow frameworks of both heart disease and women's health.

Tullio Terni (1888-1946): The life of a neurocardioanatomist with a tragic epilogue.

Tullio Terni (1888-1946) was a pioneer of neuroanatomy at the University of Padua. He gave milestone contributions in the knowledge of cardiac innervation with the discovery of the "Terni column", a preganglionic autonomous nervous center. Due to "racial laws" introduced in Italy in 1938 by the Fascist government, he, being Jewish, was expelled from the University of Padua like many others from Italian universities. At the end of the 2nd World War, he was reinstated to his chair of Anatomy, however, having belonged to the Fascist party, he was dismissed from the Lincei Academy. It was a paradox that deteriorated his depression up to the suicide.

Pulsed Doppler Echocardiography: An Historical Perspective.

Over the past six decades, echocardiography has evolved into an important technique for not only imaging cardiac structures, but also, by employing the Doppler equation, for assessing cardiac blood flow and tissue velocities. This review focuses on pulsed Doppler echocardiography: its principles, early development, and clinical applications. Important clinical applications include: (1) measurement of flow velocities, stroke volumes, and regurgitant and shunt volumes; (2) assessment of time intervals, e.g., pulmonary artery acceleration time as a measure of pulmonary artery pressure and resistance or the timing of mitral regurgitation in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy; (3) detection of turbulent flow in regurgitation, stenoses, and shunts, enhanced by the implementation of color Doppler; and (4) evaluation of left ventricular diastolic function in conjunction with pulsed tissue Doppler and deformation (strain) measurements.

Group Weight Loss and Multiple Screening: A Tale of Two Heart Disease Programs in Postwar American Public Health.

In the late 1940s, amid elevated concern about heart disease and new funding to fight it, multiple screening emerged alongside group psychotherapy for weight loss as two innovative responses of the American public health community. I describe the early trajectory and fate in the 1950s of both programs as shaped by the ongoing political controversy about national health insurance. Group weight loss became the main de facto American response to a perceived obesity-driven heart disease crisis. The episode casts light on the larger picture of how postwar American public health gravitated toward interventions centered on individual behavior and may offer lessons for obesity interventions today.

The Development of Color Doppler Echocardiography: Innovation and Collaboration.

Conception, development, innovation, introduction, and validation are some of the steps in the introduction of new technologies and their clinical applications. More than 50 years ago, Doppler techniques and applications were introduced into echocardiography. An important further addition was the introduction of color as a medium for the display of Doppler information. The amplitude of the returning ultrasound signal has been used to generate a black and white image of structure. The phase shift between the transmitted and returning Doppler signal has been used to display Doppler shift information in color. This review focuses on some of the resources critical to this new development, the challenges imposed by the introduction of a new color display, and some of the early clinical validation and applications of color Doppler echocardiography.

El fondo histórico de la angina de pecho / Historical background of angina pectoris

El autor desarrola los principales hitos en la historia de la angina de pecho o angor pectoris, desde el denominado papiro de Ebers hasta nuestros días

The author develops the main milestones in the history of angina pectoris or angor pectoris, from the so-called Ebers papyrus to the present day