Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 May 2012
This paper was originally written for a conference entitled ‘The Future of Medical History. Now it ought to be clear – certainly to historians – that the future of anything is hard to predict; but at least in the short term, any future for medical history seems likely to include the history of disease, and the history of coronary heart disease (CHD) provides an excellent example of what the history of disease has to offer to a wide range of audiences.
1 Owsei Temkin, The Falling Sickness: A History of Epilepsy from the Greeks to the Beginnings of Modern Neurology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1945).
2 Charles E. Rosenberg, ‘Framing Disease: Illness, Society, and History’, in Charles E. Rosenberg and Janet Golden (eds), Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), xiii–xxvi; Roger Cooter, ‘“Framing” the End of the Social History of Medicine’, in Frank Huisman and John Harley Warner (eds), Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 309–37.
3 Judith Mackay and George A. Mensah, The Atlas of Heart Disease and Stroke (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2004).
4 Joel Howell, ‘Early Perceptions of the Electrocardiogram: From Arrhythmia to Infarction’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 58 (1984), 83–98.
5 James Herrick, ‘An Intimate Account of My Early Experience With Coronary Thrombosis’, American Heart Journal, 27 (1944), 1–18.
6 David Jones, ‘Visions of a Cure: Visualization, Clinical Trials, and Controversies in Cardiac Therapeutics, 1968–1998’, Isis, 91 (2000), 504–41.
7 Joel Howell, Technology in the Hospital: Transforming Patient Care in the Early Twentieth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).