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Organic heart disease caused 124,000 deaths in 1920, highlighting the rising mortality of chronic diseases and the need to understand their causative factors.
An early 20th-century paper discussing the rising prevalence of heart disease and the need to understand its etiology.
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Historical data frame the enduring heart disease burden; leaves open modern etiologic and preventive insights.
Preventive medicine has scored great triumphs in the realm of epidemic and infectious diseases, reducing the death rate from these diseases in civilized countries remarkably. This reduction is largely due to the accurate knowledge of the etiology of these affections gained through scientific studies on their causative organisms. Whereas the death rate from epidemic diseases in consequence of our knowledge of their pathogenesis has on the whole been falling, the death rate from chronic diseases, notably cancer and heart disease, has been rising, 124,000 persons having died of organic heart disease, exclusive of acute endocarditis and pericarditis, in 1920.1Heart disease has now become the leader of the forces of death. If we are to prevent heart disease in the future, or even increase the expectancy of persons having it, we must increase our knowledge of the factors concerned in its production. In this paper I shall attempt to
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George Fahr (1923) conducted a review in Heart disease. Organic heart disease caused 124,000 deaths in 1920, highlighting the rising mortality of chronic diseases and the need to understand their causative factors.
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