Appreciating Hypertension, Quicksands and Firm Ground

Carey Franklin Coombs achieved great distinction as a physician and pioneer of cardiac research despite a relatively early death at the age of 52 years. At Bristol General Hospital he organised a University Centre of Cardiac Research where he pursued his studies of rheumatic heart disease, cardiovascular syphilis and the aetiology of other cardiac diseases, Lawrence O'Shaughnessy gave the first Carey Coombs Memorial Lecture in 1937 on the subject of cardio omentopexy in the treatment of angina pectoris. Of the dozen or so Carey Coombs lectures since the war, only one has dealt with the subject of hypertension, that given by Sir Stanley Peart on renal hypertension in 1972. Fifteen years ago, medication for hypertension was complex not to say chaotic. One personal landmark was the referral of a patient who was discharged from a specialist hypertension unit taking no less than 40 tablets