Heart disease

“By the late 1940s, a different paradigm of heart disease was emerging, one in which the acute emergency of a heart attack had an extended biological history. Textbook authors increasingly emphasized the central role of long-term arteriosclerosis in the development of heart disease. According to Paul Dudley White, coronary heart disease was virtually synonymous with the effects of diseased coronary arties . . . The heart remained a pump, but one that hopefully might be spared through prevention rather than salvaged by treatment. . . . The principal hopes for prophylaxis lay in altering the high levels of cholesterol found in the blood of heart attack victims” (Marks, 169).