Myocardial infarction

[Lewis and other British physicians] “had trained themselves to see precise functional relationships between the muscular chambers, but when it came to signals that the heart was failing, they were interested in the performance of the whole myocardium, not in any anatomically distinct part of it. Infarction, like a damaged valve, was not of importance of itself. Herrick, on the other hand, was not educated in this outlook. He used the ECG as a transducer. He was not only interested in the rhythm of the heart but, through the shape of the QRS complex, in its anatomical, not simply its functional, architecture” (Lawrence, 28).