Myocardial Infarction and Angina Pectoris in the History of Medicine on the Polish Soil

Abstract

This tale concentrates on a fatal affliction that has been permanently associated with human fate since time immemorial, well before Homo sapiens were even consciously aware of their existence. Incidentally, circulatory failure might have developed in the course of various severe diseases, cardiac defects, septic conditions, severe injuries; what is more – it could have been apparent in all age groups. Theoretically, the disease had every chance to have been noted much earlier in the history of mankind than for example ischemic heart disease and the observers might have been our primogenitors-medicians who were blessed with a keen perceptiveness of the rules of nature. Circulatory failure later started to reveal itself only when human life became long enough to allow for natural death to occur, i.e. the demise resulting from biological ageing of the organism could have gained prevalence over the then domineering causes of death: the ever-present homicide in the fight for survival, traumas and infections. If it comes to that, circulatory failure could be ultimately blamed for natural deaths of the majority of human beings for millions of years. Yet, this is not the point – the point is the history of rational recognizing and well thought-out attempts at treating the disease that in its nature is the expression of an upset balance of the circulatory system. Here we need to assume that in the history of medicine, the form of circulatory failure being a consequence of non-cardiac diseases, or in other words a simple circulatory complication of another, inevitably fatal disease, could not have been differentiated by ancient physicians from primary ailments of the cardiovascular system. In the practice of a historian of medicine, it is much simpler to pick out from historical tests information on the terminal stage of – say coronary heart disease with its drastic incidents of pain than to find reports on mundane deterioration of health, gradual waning of life amidst not quite spectacular symptoms (with some exceptions, though) that were treated as a natural end of life. It is worthwhile, then, to start with such evident descriptions of a severe heart disease, where we also can find properties pointing to circulatory failure. Indeed, the very circulatory failure as an ailment with which ancient physicians could not successfully cope, always had to end with the demise of a patient that was treated as the socalled ”natural death”. Throughout the period when through partitions Poland was robbed of existing as an independent nation, in the years 1795-1918, the Polish soil became the home country of