Jacob Mendez DaCost a: Medical teacher, clinician, and clinical investigator

Abstract

J. M. DaCosta, a scholarly, well-trained and observant clinician, was recognized during his lifetime as a well-known authority on physical diagnosis and had an unexcelled reputation as a clinical teacher. Chairman of Medicine at the Jefferson Medical College for 19 years, president of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in 1884 and again in 1895, he was one of the original members of the Association of American Physicians and its president in 1897. Earlier in his career, his extensive Civil War study of “a form of cardiac malady common among soldiers … the study of which is equally interesting to the civil practitioner” was described in his 1871 paper “On Irritable Heart; A Clinical Study of a Form of Functional Cardiac Disorder and Its Consequences.” Soon labeled DaCosta's syndrome, the irritable heart lineage can be traced through the soldier's heart, the effort syndrome, and neurocirculatory asthenia in World War I, anxiety neurosis in World War II, and the mitral valve prolapse syndrome in the second half of the 20th century.