1864

Pub of Jacob Da Costa’s Medical Diagnosis, which included a section related to his wartime work on cardiology and went through nine editions (Devine, 158-9). After War, Da Costa’s publications explained value and meaning of murmurs as signs of organic valvular disease; and explored “irritable heart” (stress, anxiety, cardiac exhaustion); and recorded his experiments with remedies (e.g., tincture of gelsemium [yellow jasmine plant], veratrum viride [American hellebore, another plant], belladonna, or tincture of digitalis) to reduce the pulse. Also, “Through his research with his Civil War patients, Da Costa was able to demonstrate that irritable heart could develop into cardiac enlargement and functional heart disease could be transformed into organic heart disease” (159-163).