Medicine: The Specialized Nubbin

• Share

(See Cover)

The mightiest of monarchs was dead. The royal embalmers removed most of his vital organs but left enough to show physicians of later ages what ailed him: hardening and narrowing of the vital arteries near the heart. The monarch was Merneptah, Pharaoh of Egypt at the time (some believe) of the Exodus. No fewer than 3,000 years had passed when the chief of the modern world's most powerful state had a heart attack brought on by the same type of disease in the arteries. Yet for all but a handful of these years, nothing had been learned about the causes of heart-and-artery disease, and virtually nothing about its treatment.

Long before President Eisenhower's attack, heart disease became a major American worry. Other diseases were being triumphantly conquered with wonder drugs and new surgical techniques, but one result of keeping people alive longer, it seemed, was to make all the surer that they would eventually have heart attacks. Heart-and-artery disease was pinpointed as the nation's No. 1 killer—with ample statistical reason. It now accounts for 800,000 deaths a year, half the U.S. total.

To many foreign visitors, and some Americans, heart disease has become the typical American illness. The U.S., so the argument goes, is the land of tension and conflict. Men work too hard, play too hard, worry too hard. The image of the tycoon who, at 50, has attained money, success, a yacht and coronary thrombosis is almost part of American folklore. Today, more than ever, anxious men (far more than women) of middle age are scurrying to doctors' offices for a heart checkup. More than two-thirds will be told that they have nothing to worry about; the others can look for no quick cures, but can count on treatment to reduce discomfort and danger. In any case, many tools and techniques used by doctors to examine patients, and virtually everything that they prescribe, have been perfected in the lifetime of a generation no older than Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The Big Mystery. Heart disease is still medicine's most stubborn mystery. Again and again, the killer has eluded its pursuers. From Pharaonic times until this century, the medical profession took a fatalistic attitude that most heart disease was inevitable. Today, a health-and youth-conscious U.S. wants to believe those doctors who insist that no disease process is natural at any age. The pursuit of the killer is proceeding with greater speed—and hope—than ever.

This week top men in charge of that pursuit, 2,000 American heart specialists, met in New Orleans at the 28th scientific convention of the American Heart Association to tell each other how they were doing. An early order of business was installation of a new president. Their choice: Dr. Irvine H. Page, now of Cleveland, at 54 one of the country's leading detectives on the trail of the killer.