Excerpt from Diseases of the Heart and Arteries: Their Causes, Nature and Treatment

A colleague, a patient of mine, now on the retired list, was many years ago refused by a life insurance office because he had a valvular defect in his heart. Now, if he had been a layman, or if he had not had the advantage of knowing something more than is taught in ordinary text books, he might have done as many a one has done under like circumstances - gone home, given himself up for lost, and verified the insurance doctor's prognosis by dying in a short time. He did nothing of the kind. He went to work as usual, made up his mind to insure himself, and has lived long enough to save the sum he would have paid in premiums three or four times over.

Not very long ago an old patient of mine came to me in a terrible state of agitation. A note he brought me, announcing the fact that an insurance office to which he had applied for a policy could not see its way to accept him, explained his trouble. He had a valvular defect, it is true, but it was fully compensated. I assured him that there was not the least necessity for him to regard the refusal as a sentence of death, and advised him to follow the example of my friend and insure himself. Life took a new aspect to him he recovered his spirits and has not required any assistance from me since that time.

As my object is to deal more especially with the therapeutic: of heart disease, I shall only devote to the consideration of the pathology of diseases of the heart and its vessels just so much Space as is needed for my purpose. My work on Iodide of Arsenic in Organic Disease of the Heart being now out of print, I have made use of the material it contained in the present volume, and also of the cases narrated in a paper which I contributed to the World's Homoeopathic Congress of r893, entitled The Curative Action of Homoeopathic Remedies in Cases of Organic Disease of the Heart.

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