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A historical look at a heart condition caused by infection

Harold Smulyan, MDDonald Blair, MDA cardiologist (Harold Smulyan, MD, left) and an infectious disease expert (Donald Blair, MD) from Upstate look at the history of infective endocarditis -- an inflammation of the inner lining of the heart and its tissues, usually caused by a bacterial infection -- in a paper published in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences. The disease was first reported in the early 1800s, and Smulyan explains that "before the development of antibiotics, this disease was uniformly fatal." His research identifies a number of famous patients who died from infective endocarditis, including Scottish poet Robert Burns in 1796; composer Gustay Mahler in 1907; German physician Alois Alzheimer, the founding father of neuropathology, in 1915; and silent-screen star Rudolph Valentino in 1926.

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