The Heart (Cont'd)

Like the chicken-or-the-egg dilemma, a question that has long puzzled medical men is: Where originates the impulse that makes the heart beat? Some have contended that the heart nerves originate the impulse; others, that it begins in the muscle of the heart. Last week 22 authorities, 150 clinicians and 1,800 physicians attending the New York Academy of Medicine's graduate fortnight on the heart saw a microscopic motion picture of a first heart beat and considered the problem settled.

Dr. Bradley Merrill Patten, embryologist of Western Reserve University, showed a film, taken with a special microscopic lens, of the heart of an unhatched chicken. Twenty-nine hours after incubation, five days before the formation of any nerve tissue, the heart began to beat. The beat began in the portion of the heart which later became the right ventricle, not in the "pacemaker" portion, where begin the normal beats of a fully developed heart. The pictures showed that before the formation of any chambers the heart is a straight tube with no indentations. Later it twists upon itself, becomes U-shaped, then S-shaped. After the beats are established, the blood flow begins, the "pacemaker" contracts, the heart begins to work normally. C. Dr. Marcus Adolphus Rothschild of Manhattan warned that telling sufferers from myocarditis (inflammation of the muscular walls of the heart) that they have heart disease often leads to the development of a heart phobia that lasts a lifetime.

P:Sir Thomas Lewis, editor of the English journal, Heart, described experiments into the cause of peripheral neuritis, a disease affecting the nerves, producing intense pain, usually in the extremities. He found the cause was a deficiency of blood in the nerves, a condition known as ischemia.

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