The Question of Traumatic Heart Disease

IN a socially enlightened age of compensation and disability insurance, the relation of trauma to disease requires careful analysis. Only too often the prospect of reimbursement induces the patient, subconsciously at least, to relate his symptoms to some incident of ubiquitous trauma. Unfortunately and also too often, the sympathetic physician uncritically accepts the cause-and-effect relationship suggested by the patient and may even report the case in the medical literature affirming this impression. In the field of cancer such uncritical acceptance of the influence of trauma has resulted in mistaken concepts, which are only recently being broken down by the vigorous and forceful opposition of leading authorities x whose opinions are based on scientific facts. A similarly critical attitude also seems warranted in assessing the con-dition that has come to be known as traumatic heart disease. Kahn and Kahn,2 who presented a simple and adequate classification of lesions and other effects produced in the heart by trauma, expressed a thorough com-