In 1768, William Heberden gave a lecture at the College of Physicians of London in which he coined the term "angina pectoris" for the chest pain that he and others had observed. His description:
They who are afflicted with it, are seized while they are walking, (more especially if it be up hill, and soon after eating) with a painful and most disagreeable sensation in the breast, which seems as if it would extinguish life, if it were to increase or to continue; but the moment they stand still, all this uneasiness vanishes. . . . In all other respects, patients are, at the beginning of this disorder, perfectly well. . . . Males are most liable to this disease, especially such as have past their fiftieth year.
About the same time, the English surgeon John Hunter detected disease of the coronary arteries upon doing an autopsy on an individual who had died in a fit of anger. He said: "My life is in the hands of any rascal who chooses to annoy me." In 1793, Hunter collapsed and died, presumably of a myocardial infarction, soon after leaving a particularly ireful meeting.
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