What Does Your Heart Tell You? A Reconceptualization of Functional Cardiac Symptoms in Finland (1940s–1980s)

Abstract

During the Continuation War of 1941–1944, Finnish medical experts began to encounter military patients suffering from chest pains, breathlessness, palpitations, fatigue, and many other symptoms which could not be explained by somatic findings. In the history of medicine, these symptoms and a plethora of associated diagnoses (such as ‘Da Costa syndrome’, ‘soldier’s heart’, ‘effort syndrome’, ‘nca’, ‘neurocirculatory dystonia’, and so on) have been studied for the most part in the contexts of war, especially in connection with World War I. Most of medical and psychiatric discussion of the syndrome in Finland, however, took place after World War ii. Importantly, this included the emergence of an informal public education campaign which sought to promote an understanding of the harmlessness of ‘functional cardiac symptoms’. In this article, I examine the development and transformations of the discourse of functional cardiac symptoms in Finland through an analysis of the medical discussions. The post-war introduction of medical theories of stress and psychosomatic medicine had a significant impact on how the complaints related to functional cardiac symptoms were addressed. I aim to show that the rethinking of the connection between mind and body, as well as the increasing understanding of hormonal functions of the body, adjusted the demarcation between somatic medicine and psychiatry following the dissemination of psychosomatic medicine and the concept of stress.