Some Forms of Undiagnosed Coronary Disease in Nineteenth-Century England

FOR MANY years the increased incidence of ischaemic heart disease has been the starting-point for researches into those altered factors in our way of life, our diet or our environment which are today held responsible for the enormous mortality of coronary occlusion. Recently this basic assumption has been challenged by Campbell1 (1963) and Robb-Smith2 (1967) who present plausible arguments for believing that (in this country, anyway) there has been no actual increase in incidence, and that the increase in diagnosis is due to a rise in the expectation of life, to modifications in the classification of mortality statistics, and to changes in the nomenclature of disease.