This month’s
Pediatric Annals focuses on the recent National Institutes of Health recommendations for screening of all children for lipid disorders. Three excellent review papers are included here, all written by national authorities, covering the topics of obesity, lipid screening, and hypertension. All obviously fall within the preventive cardiology domain. Each review focuses on pediatric aspects of its respective topic. The new recommendations will have significant impact upon all providers of health care for children, and they are landmarks in the field by highly respected authorities.
Additionally, this issue includes an excellent review of the topic of elbow injuries in children and adolescents, an important topic especially within the sports medicine area.
This Month’s Stamps
The stamps chosen to accompany this column include the 1996 stamp from India illustrating the gross anatomy of the heart and celebrating 100 years of cardiac surgery. The other two stamps honor physicians who contributed immensely to our understanding of the circulatory system.
The 2011 stamp from Spain honors the 500th anniversary of the birth of Miguel Servet and schematically depicts the systemic and pulmonary circulatory systems. Servet is also known as Michael Servetus and Michel de Villeneuve. He was born in 1511 in Villaneuve de Sijena, Spain, and was a famous Spanish theologian, physician, cartographer, and humanist. He was educated in Paris and Montpellier, receiving his MD in 1539. He is considered the first European to describe the function of the pulmonary circulation.
In the 13th Century, an Arab physician, Ibn al-Nafis, had correctly described the pulmonary circulation, but it appears that Servetus independently made his discovery that in the lungs the blood meets air, changes from dark red to bright red, returns to the left ventricle and then to the body. Servetus buried his discovery within a theologic treatise he wrote in 1553, but he unwisely sent a copy to John Calvin, leader of the Protestant Reformation, located in Geneva.
Calvin denounced Servetus as a heretic and arranged for him (and his books) to be burned at the stake in 1553. Servetus is widely honored in Spain, as evidenced by this stamp and by the many streets, squares, parks, and at least one hospital named for him.
The brown 1987 stamp from Hungary (Magyar) honors William Harvey (1578–1657), born in Folkestone, Kent, England and educated in Cambridge and Padua. In 1609, he was the physician at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London (which was founded in 1123 and is still functioning!). After studying more than 80 animal species, Harvey published De Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalbus (Movement of the Heart and Blood in Animals) in 1628; it described the systemic and pulmonary circulations in detail. Harvey also described the fetal circulation including the foramen ovale and the ductus arteriosus.