1947

Launching of Framingham Heart Study, which popularized the term “risk factor” and mapped the relations of coronary heart disease to factors such as serum cholesterol, blood pressure, and cigarette smoking and followed its cohort for more than a half century (Oppenheimer, 602). Owing to its careful nurture of the community’s elite and the community’s early adoption of the research, after almost 30 years of follow-up, the study had only a 3% drop out rate (606). In 1949, the study was taken over by the newly established National Health Institute, which “stood the previous investigation on its head. Framingham would be a ‘follow-up’ study, 20 years in duration, of individuals free initially of atherosclerotic or hypertensive cardiovascular disease” (607). In the 1950s, “Framingham first reported significant correlations between CHD and blood pressure, obesity and cholesterol, as well as pivotal techniques for analyzing such multiple factors simultaneously” (609). Zoll’s first successful use of external pacemaker on patient with regular Stokes-Adams attacks, was in 1952: the device kept him alive for 25 minutes; his second patient made a full recovery (Morris, loc 2878ff. ).