The Birmingham age-herald., 1920-05-09
HOW THE HEART BEATS

length of a rope. When the toss. nOH-
 ever. instead of running regularly dow%
 the length of the rope, scatters it's force
 and merely sets the rope shaking fee@ly
 throughout it's length, it losses its force, and in the same way when the beat of the heart. instead of running regularly l and easily down from the top of the 1 heart to the bottom, merely sets the heNrt feebly a-quiver, we have the condition | called fibrillation. And here we have a disordered heart. and very serious con dition, which is discovered in from 60 to 70 per cent of all heart cases in our hos pitals.
 There are several forms of this con-
 dition. The beat, ,instead of running feebly and irregularly down from the top of the organ to the bottom, may run around the upper part of the heart and
 produce what we call 'futtering. The es-
 sential condition is the same howeve>.
 and it is not one to be lightly approachedA 'Palpitation of the heart is the popular name for it.
 HOW VIVISECTION HELPED ''It has long been the subject of re- search work by some of the greatest heart specialists of the day, notably Dr. Thomas Lewis. M. D.. F. R. S.. of the University College Hospital London, and Sir James Mackenzie, both of them heart 1 specialists of worldwide authority. l ne pest WOTh lOWdTQ lue Sluuy ol aurioular fibrillation, as the doctors call 1 it. began in 1909 simultaneously in Vienna and London, with the perfection of the electro-cardiograp By this instrument an observer sat underground where g. base for his instrument free of all vibra- ton could be secured, and watched the heart beats of patient who might be on the top floor of nearby hospital. This instrument diagrammed the heart beats AI ArIf a11 showed with broad black line which was quite regular in it's formation, the intervals between the beats of a normal heart. The intervals between the beats
 of a disordered heart. however, were
 shown by very marked vibrations in tue
 broad black line.
 With these electro-cardiograms ob-
 tained in hundreds of cases, the work of
 research into disordered conditions of the
 human heart began. Our next step was
 to go more intimately into the structure
 of the heart than we could with human
 beings. We chloroformed dogs, laid open
 their chests to expose the heart, and
 then produced the disordered conditions
 which we had discovered in human
 hearts, deducing from our success the
 cause of disordered hearts in human be-
 ings. It may be said here, incidentally,
 that these operations on dogs were en-
 tirely painless. Apart from all consid-
 erations of humanity which of course
 bound us, 1t would have been fatal to the
 success of our experiments to have per
 nitted the dogs to suffer pain, for pain
 in itself deranges the action of the heart
 for the time being. 1t goes without say ing that the dogs were willed before com
 ing out from under the influence of tSe
 chloroform, and the entire process was
 as painless to the dogs as are the lethal
 chambers in which the police put to
 death thousands of stray dogs every year.
 CURE EXPECTED IN A YEAR
 ''By these experiments on dogs we src-
 ceeded in discovering the cause of dis
 ordered heart. Our discovery, as we now
 know it, is couched in highly technical
 terms, but reduced to simple terms, we
 learned that in a disordered heart the
 sort of electric current by which the im-
 pulse known as the heart beat passes down the muscles of the heart, encounters
 faulty wires, the current is broken up,
 every muscle fibre begins twitching is-
 dependenflv and in some cases, one single
 current, so to speak, gets loose and goes
 cours1ng round and round the heart We
 know now that If the current is faulty
 we must improve the circuit. and by as-
 tering the chemical composition of the
 blood by means of certain chemical sales,
 we hope we will be able to improve it
 and to set this fluttering, useless, palpi- tating heart beating strongly, steadily and
 regularly.
 s"These are facts that have come to
 light in the last year, and at present
 every month, almost every week, is fa-
 creasng our knowledge of our problem.
 We are really in the second stage of our
 work The first stage was the discov-
 cry of fibrillation; that was followed by
 research into the structure of the human
 heart, until now we know intimately al-
 most every fibre of the heart muscles ~e know for instance. down to ten-thous- andths of a second, how long 1t talNoE the heart beat to travel down the muscles of the heart. The second stage of our work, on which we are now engaged, is to discover exactly what fibrillation is. and exactly what is going on in the heart which displays it. That step is al most complete. The announcement of its completion, we hope, can be made in very short time now.
 What influence will the completion Of this second stage have upon the treat ment of heart disease? It is not at all possible to say now. It is possible to say, however, that when it is completed we shall have far greater understanding of disordered action of the heart, and tbat in itself, apart from all questions Of specific remedies will be greatly to the benefit of treatment. It is of no use sreaking of cure or the possibilities of | cure, until the means are in our hands. The question of cure or alleviation of discrdered action of the heart constitutes the third stage of our work. and that has been hardly entered upon.
 "Our knowledge now leads us to sup pose that electric shocks may be of use | in rectifying the action of a disordered heart A certain course of exercises or certain chemical preparation are also expected to prove valuable. But this is pure guesswork at present. Come back and talk to us a year from now, and we'll have something definite to tell you
 Captain Elliot has already made large place for himself in the British House of Commons as a sort of iaison officer between research work and the pus.ic. The scientist he says, "is a shy man. and after spending years of his life in making a great discovery, he hides 1t away in terrible language in an obscure book and dies. I want to make the pub
 lie understand what the men of science arc doing for them.
 He is young man and was born In I,anark, Scotland. in 1888. He was edu- cated at Glasgow University and served during the war as captain in the med teal corps attached to the famous Scot tisk regiment, the Scots Greys, In which he gained the military cross and bar to 1t. After the war he married, but his honeymon last September was terrible tragedy. His bride was killed at his side on the Coolin range In Skye. She lost her footing and fell. pulling her husbapd after her, and both slid down the moun- 1 tain side. Captain Elliot was uncon- scious for a time. and rescue party