On the Clinical Study of the Heart-Sounds

Abstract

Read to the Section on Practice of Medicine and Materia Medica, of Am. Med. Association, May, 1884. The volume of the transactions of the American Medical Association for 1858, contains a prize essay by me on the "Clinical Study of the Heart-Sounds in Health and Disease." The term heart-sounds in this essay, used in its conventional sense, was limited to the normal sounds of the heart, and their abnormal modifications, the term, as thus limited, not embracing adventitious sounds, these being distinguished as heart murmurs. The following quotation is from the introductory remarks in that essay: "The clinical study of cardiac affections, which has been prosecuted of late years with so much assiduity and success by observers in different countries, has had reference more especially to the murmurs. On the normal sounds and their abnormal modifications, comparatively small attention has been bestowed. In the course of investigations, having reference to