Author’s Note
Medicine in the early 19th century was more a practice of hit or miss than it was a science. There were a great number of developments later in the century, but in the early 1800’s, doctors were still experimenting with a great number of possible remedies for various ailments. Most doctors still believed that cupping, or bleeding, patients was the best way to cure them—by bleeding out the “bad humors” causing the illness. Sadly, this practice did more harm than good.
According to legend,
John Hunter, a brilliant English physician of the eighteenth century, was probably the first in Western medicine to paint the clinical picture of chest pain, called angina pectoris, and sudden death. Noting that his own symptoms were aggravated by anger, he complained that his life was “in
