The Long Fox Memorial Lecture delivered in the University of Bristol at the meeting of the Medico-Chirurgical Society on December 9th, 1925 ... by Carey F. Coombs on the ætiology of cardiac disease.

  • Coombs, C. F. (Carey Franklin), 1879-1932.
Date:
[1925?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The Long Fox Memorial Lecture delivered in the University of Bristol at the meeting of the Medico-Chirurgical Society on December 9th, 1925 ... by Carey F. Coombs on the ætiology of cardiac disease. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of others. This fact also appears to me to favour the view that physical stress predisposes to the evolution of spirochsetal lesions in the cardio-aortic area. The ages of my patients ranged from 38 to 66 ; from an age some years anterior to that at which the vessels become grossly degenerate, well on into the normal period of decrescence. Atheroma and syphilis of the aorta may overlap each other at this period, as the pictures, made by Miss Pillers from specimens kindly lent by Dr. Hadfield, show (coloured plate). Several years ago Drs. Waldo and Herapath9 published an account of a case of complete heart block due to syphilis. The auriculo-ventricular bundle was destroyed throughout by what may be described as a descending degeneration, with similar but less advanced changes in the sinu-auricular node. The difference between this and the gummatous lesion usually responsible for syphilitic heart block is very like that- subsisting between syphilitic myelitis and tabes dorsalis. The one is anatomical, the other physiological in distribution ; and this physiological distribution follows what may be called the restless tracts of the organ concerned. It is an illustration of the familiar setiological principle that when two injurious agencies attack any organ or tissue simultaneously they do more hurt, or, at all events, succeed more readily in doing it, than does either of them acting alone. The same principle also finds expression in that group of maladies that has been collectively entitled the senile heart.” In everyone a deterioration of arterial and cardiac tissue sets in somewhere about the age of 35 or 40. This deterioration, you will remember, Metchnikoff laid to the charge of the bacteria in the large intestine. If this view be true, life is one long struggle against the parasitic inhabitants of the