WHITE, PAUL. 1886-1973; and SIR THOMAS LEWIS. 1881-1945.


Heart Disease. New York: Macmillan, 1931. 8vo. Original cloth. publisher's dust jacket. Some rubbing to cloth, jacket with tears and tape repairs.Provenance: Paul Dudley White (presentation inscription in the month of publication); Sir Thomas Lewis (bookplate).WITH: Three 1914 offprints co-authored by Lewis and White, original printed wrappers: 1) The susceptible region in A-V conduction; 2) The effects of premature contractions in vagotomized dogs, with especial reference to atrio-ventricular rhythm; 3) The excitatory process in the dog's heart. Part I. The auricles. WITH: Oglesby, Paul, Take Heart: The Life and Prescription for Living of Paul Dudley White, Boston, 1986, dw, INSCRIBED "To Harold Segall, With warm regards, Oley Paul." (Segall's bookplate and marginal notations in pencil). With an additional biography.FIRST EDITION OF WHITE'S "EPOCH-MAKING" CLASSIC, INSCRIBED TO SIR THOMAS LEWIS IN THE MONTH OF PUBLICATION: "To Sir Thomas Lewis. In grateful appreciation from a pupil. Paul D. White. April 21, 1931." This unique copy links America's first academic cardiologist and electrocardiography pioneer with his mentor, Thomas Lewis, who catalyzed the creation of cardiology as a specialty. White graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1911 and served as a house office at Massachusetts General Hospital before traveling to Europe in 1913. He began working with Lewis, the English-speaking world's pioneer of electrocardiography, in the fall. White wrote to his father on October 22, 1913: "Yesterday I took my first electrocardiographic tracings, they are not so difficult to obtain; the difficulty comes rather, I suppose, in the interpretation of them after they have been acquired." Two weeks later, he informed his father, "In regard to Lewis, I am now quite enthusiastic about him and I don't think unwisely so. He's 'coming fast' and before many years if my guess is correct will be the world's greatest cardiologist" (Oglesby, pp 34-35). "For more than a generation, Boston cardiologist Paul Dudley White was America's most influential academic cardiologist" (Fye, American Cardiology: The History of a Specialty and Its College (1996), p 34). Arthur Hollman explains that in 1913 Lewis had "commenced a very difficult and ultimately a very fine experimental study in dogs on the spread of the excitatory process in the heart. The work was in process when Paul D. White aged 27 from Boston, who became one of the world's leading cardiologists, arrived in the autumn of 1913." Referring to the research that Lewis undertook with White and Canadian Jonathan Meakins, Hollman writes, "In May 1914, the first paper by Lewis, White, and Meakins was published in Heart, and it shows how much detailed work went into this study of electrical stimulation of the dog's heart ... Lewis was now at the peak of his electrophysiological studies ... and his experimental work was remarkable for its scope and technical virtuosity." Arthur Hollman, Sir Thomas Lewis: Pioneer Cardiologist and Clinical Scientist (1997), pp 55, 58. Cardiologist-historian Evan Bedford declared, "Paul White's epoch-making book for long remained unrivaled and set a new standard in cardiological text-books." Bedford 357. Harold Segall, who was a resident in White's cardiac clinic in 1923-1924, was a pioneer of Canadian cardiology.