Pain is so seldom directly associated with serious diseases of the heart that most specialists and practitioners of medicine are wont to treat lightly a patient's anxious inquiry about the heart, and to dismiss the case with no particular guidance or injunction, as one having an imaginary or neurasthenic origin.
Though it has been considerably over one hundred years—1768—since Herbenden gave the name of angina pectoris to a certain affection of the heart, which he declared must be distinguished from ordinary cardiac dyspnea, and a few years later Edward Jenner described some of the morbid conditions, which may be found in this disease, yet there is to-day no one certain and positively accepted statement of the cause of this sudden taking off of a human being, who may have previously complained but little, or not at all, of feeling badly.
Since Herbenden's time nearly all medical writers and clinicians have