"I add another observation. A noble knight, Sir Robert Darcy, an ancestor of that celebrated physician and most learned man, my very dear friend, Dr. Argent, when he had reached to about the middle period of life, made frequent complaint of a certain distressing pain in the chest, especially in the night season, so that dreading at one time syncope, at another suffocation in his attacks, he led an unquiet and anxious life. He tried many remedies in vain, having had the advice of almost every medical man. The disease going on from bad to worse, he by and by became cachectic and dropsical, and finally grievously distressed, he died in one of his paroxysms. In the body of this gentleman, at the inspection of which there were present Dr. Argent, the President of the College of Physicians, and Dr. Gorge, a distinguished theologian and preacher, who was pastor of the parish, we found the wall of the left ventricle of the heart ruptured, having a rent in it of size sufficient to admit any of my fingers, although the wall itself appeared sufficiently thick and strong. This laceration had apparently been caused by an impediment to the passage of the blood from the left ventricle into the arteries. "I was acquainted with another strong man, who, having received an injury and affront from one more powerful than himself, and upon whom he could not have his revenge, was so overcome with hatred and spite and passion, which he yet communicated to no one, that at last he fell into a strange distemper, suffering from extreme oppression and pain of the heart and breast, and the prescriptions of none of the very best physicians proving of any avail, he fell in the course of a few years into a scorbutic and cachectic state, became tabid, and died. This patient only received some little relief when the whole of his chest was pummelled or kneaded by a strong man, as a baker kneads dough. His friends thought him poisoned by some maleficent influence or possessed with an evil spirit. His jugular arteries enlarged to the size of a thumb, looked like the aorta itself, or they were as large as the descending aorta: they had pulsated violently and appeared like two long aneurysms. These symptoms had led to trying the affects of arteriotomy in the temples, but with no relief. In the dead body I found the heart and aorta so much gorged and distended with blood that the cavities of the ventricles equalled those of a bullock's heart in size. Such is the force of the blood pent up, and such are the effects of its impulse."