THE HUMAN HEART

Wairarapa Daily Times, 25 February 1935, Page 5

THE HUMAN HEART

isTERY AND FEAR / •• ■ OUT-OF-DATE IDEAS. Press Association Electric Telegraph—Copyright (Received Monday, 10.45 a.m.) LONDON, Sunday. Nine-tenths of the mystery and much of fear regarding the human heart lias disappeared, ’ ’ said Captain Whitney, secretary pf the National Hospital for Diseases of the Heart, in a statement to the “Daily Mail.” Captain Whitney ■was commenting on the American case, in which a patient suffering from angina pectoris was relieved by cutting a strip of muscle from the chest and attaching it to the heart, thus providing a new blood-stream. He added: “The belief that if the heart/ were touched death would follow was entirely out-of-date. One of our surgeons many times has insAjted a long needle into the heart. a stab in the heart is not necessarily fatal. Moreover, we now know that the old-fashioned idea of general heart disease, for which the usual treatment was to lie down and do nothing, was largely a bogey. We have also dropped the term 'fatty degeneration,’ because the trouble is usually not with the heart, but with the fat. The is exercise to reduce obesity.”