ABC | Volume 113, Nº3, September 2019

Editorial Cardiology and the Cardiologist – Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow Evandro Tinoco Mesquita 1,2, 3 e Aurea Lucia Alves de Azevedo Grippa de Souza 1 Universidade Federal Fluminense, 1 Niterói, RJ – Brazil Hospital Pró-Cardíaco, 2 Rio de Janeiro, RJ – Brazil Diretoria de Qualidade Assistencial da Sociedade Brasileira de Cardiologia, 3 Rio de Janeiro, RJ – Brazil Mailing Address: Evandro Tinoco Mesquita • Ministro Otávio Kely, 500 1506, Icarái, Niterói, RJ – Brazil E-mail: etmesquita@gmail.com Keywords Cardiology/history; Heart Diseases/history; History,19th Century; History,20th Century; Humans; Animals; Cardiology/ trends; Brazilian Society of Cardiology/history. DOI: 10.5935/abc.20190207 Carlos Chagas was the first “modern” cardiologist in Brazil. Professor Nelson Botelho Reis President of the SBC: 1945-1975 management Cardiology as a medical specialty has been built from scientific knowledge derived from basic and clinical areas and from the development of technological devices that enabled us to study and understand the cardiovascular system. Two technological disruptive capacitors were: the stethoscope and the electrocardiogram, which allowed for the construction of two new “sciences”, the eletroctrocardiography and the phonomecanography. Certainly, the complexity of understanding the eletroctrocardiography and its electroclinical correlation has made Cardiology to become a specialty independent from clinical medicine, in the early 20th century. In the post-war years, technical-scientific developments allowed Cardiology to be prepared to become a solid area of action, and enabled the new search for therapeutic approaches, which contributed to the increased survival rates observed in basically all cardiopathies. The foundation of the Brazilian Society of Cardiology (SBC), on August 14, 1943, was an important mark in our country, which enabled to tie together doctors dedicated to cardiovascular teaching, research and care. Thus, since 2005, the cardiologists day has been celebrated. The SBC and its brand logos have been transformed as it searches to connect our tradition and the contemporaneity of our cardiology and its international insertion and relevance (Figure 1). 1 The trajectory of this specialty traverses the emergence of the SBC, the propagation of training courses, the creation of the Arquivos Brasileiros de Cardiologia in 1948 and the first specialists’ titles. Over the years, in association with the hospitalist practice and the great technological development, Cardiology was divided into specific specialty areas: emergency cardiology and cardiac intensivism, congenital cardiopathies, cardiac surgery, hemodynamics, echocardiography, electrophysiology, among others. In order to understand the future, it is necessary to look back into the past and realize the huge steps of this specialty, which grows worldwide, aligned with the contemporaneity of the challenges to prevent and treat cardiovascular diseases in a safe manner, based on guidelines and focusing on the patient. Going back to remote times, we can rescue the registries of the first steps of the specialty that we call protocardiology. Leonardo da Vinci’s observations, drawings and notes of the heart, made in 1490, are deemed as pioneering in the history of Cardiology. As author of the first graphic representation of the coronary arteries, he also explained the heart fluid dynamics and defined the formation of the aortic valve cusp and the sinus wall. It is possible to state that Da Vinci was a renaissance cardiologist. 2 In the mid-1500s, Andreas Vesalius published a wonderful atlas of anatomy in his "Fabricius". In this publication, he called the heart the "center of life". This publication corrects the anatomical mistakes described by Galen and, for many historians, it is the mark of modern medicine. Modern cardiology has its beginnings with the publication of the book De Motus Cordis , written by the English physician and scientist William Harvey, the father of Cardiology, 3 which caused a “hurricane” in science and medicine when it asserted, based on studies in animals and humans, that the blood goes from the heart through closed spaces and returns through veins into the heart. The evolution of the history of Cardiology in Brazil was brilliantly revised by professor Nelson Botelho Reis and published in the Arquivos Brasileiros de Cardiologia , in 1986. 4 He reinforces that the clinical-anatomic method was the first method in clinical medicine that evolved from a simple confirmation (“findings of necropsy”) or from the verification of the disease in an emerging scientific area, correlating the patient’s clinical picture. Important Italian (Malpigi, Morgami); French (Vienssens, Bichat and Laennec) and German (Virchow) physicians were fundamental to the construction of this new discipline. The Anatomopathology witnessed the emergence of Histology, which brought to light the importance of examining cells and tissues, and of expanding the correlation and causal mechanisms of diseases. The physicians interested in the area of Cardiology presented a growing and e robust method to explain the abnormal cardiovascular findings and necropsy data. In our country, the central influence of the cardiovascular anatomoclinical method was important for the formation of cardiologists until the beginning of the 1980’s, initially influenced by Sylvio Carvalhal (São Paulo), Professor Luigi Bogliolo (Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais). Also, Professor Manoel Barreto Neto, whom I was honored to be a student of and from whom I received deep knowledge and the strength of the anatomoclinical method, along with the findings presented by Professor Raul Carlos Pareto Junior. The  Arquivos Brasileiros de Cardiologia also publishes its traditional anatomoclinical section, an important tool for the formation of young cardiologists. 335