The European Heart Journal and the European Journal of Heart Failure: Partners in scientific publishing

摘要

More than 200 years ago, the English physician William Withering (1741-1799; Figure 1) learned of the remarkable successes of an old woman practising as a folk herbalist in Shropshire with a formulation of dried leaves in patients with, what we would call today, congestive heart failure. He started to use the remedy in his own practice and confirmed the effectiveness of the plant mixture in his own patients. In 1785, he published his seminal monograph 'An Account of the Foxglove and Some of its Medical Uses with Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Disease'1 in which he identified digitalis lanata as the active ingredient. Although William Harvey had discovered the circulation and the role of the heart as a pump in his groundbreaking book 'De Motu Cordis'2 more than a hundred years earlier, Withering did not fully understand the underlying causes of what he called dropsy. Nevertheless, his oedematous and dyspnoeic patients started to urinate, lost weight, and felt better in response to his novel remedy.