From Mummies to Modern Medicine: The Origins of Heart Disease
SCIENCE
When we often think about heart disease, we see it as something modern, usually caused by fast food, stress, and long hours sitting at a desk. But did you know that heart disease is ancient? People had clogged arteries thousands of years ago, even before electricity or cheeseburgers were invented!
Ancient Mummies
When scientists study and research mummies from ancient Egypt, they have found something fascinating. One of the oldest medical records, called the Ebers Papyrus (from around 1500 BCE in ancient Egypt), made by Egyptians, described symptoms like chest pain and fainting. Scientists then had CT-scanned mummies and found that many of them had atherosclerosis, which is when it starts to build up in your arteries and makes your heart start working harder. And some of these mummies are over 3,500 years old, and even they showed signs of heart disease! This means that our modern world is not the cause of heart disease; this is something that is ancient.
Discovery by Doctors
In 1682, William Harvey, an English doctor, discovered that the heart pumps blood throughout the body in circles. Before this, people did not know that the heart was capable of this. Later, in 1706, a scientist, Giovanni Maria Lancisi, completed an autopsy (a study of a body after death) and saw that someone who had chest pain while alive had narrowed arteries, which is a sign of heart disease.
The First Official Diagnosis
The first official discovery of heart disease was in 1912, when Dr. James Herrick used new tools like the electrocardiogram (ECG) to diagnose a heart attack in a living patient. That was the first time someone had officially connected chest pain with blocked heart arteries while the patient was still alive. This became the beginning of modern cardiology, the science of treating the heart.
Why this is Important
Even with all the science and technology we have today, heart disease is still the #1 cause of death in many countries, including the United States. Learning the history of how heart disease was discovered helps us understand how far we’ve come, and how much more there is to do to keep hearts healthy around the world.