The Bradshaw lecture on the causation of functional heart murmurs : delivered before the Royal College of Physicians, London, on November 2, 1899 / by Arthur Foxwell.

  • Foxwell, Arthur.
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Bradshaw lecture on the causation of functional heart murmurs : delivered before the Royal College of Physicians, London, on November 2, 1899 / by Arthur Foxwell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ON THE CAUSATION OF FUNCTIONAL HEART MURMURS. Mr. President and Gentlemen, When Sir Samuel Wilks graciously surprised me with the request to deliver this lecture I did not hesitate to accept the honour, but for some time lay in doubt as to my subject. In the end I came to think that I should be most likely to have matter worthy your acceptance if I spoke concerning things in which I was most interested. Hence the title of this lecture. The etiology of the so-called inorganic cardiac murmurs has always seemed to me to be one of the opprobria medicince. These murmurs are heard by each one of us almost daily, and yet to none can the vague and varying statements of their causation have ever proved satisfactory. During the last 16 years their etiology has been with me a subject of much thought and investigation. At last I feel quite clear in my own mind as to its nature. But to convince you is a different, more arduous, and far more important matter—one which, I perceive, may well be beyond me and one to which I now address myself with a full sense of its difficulty. In the short space of one lecture I find it impossible to con- sider duly all these murmurs; I shall therefore confine myself to the commonest and yet most obscure—I mean the murmur heard over the second and third left spaces which, for the sake of brevity, I shall speak of as the pulmonary murmur. This murmur is systolic in time and is never accompanied by a