Maude Abbott is one of the best known Canadian physicians of the twentieth century.¹ Born in 1869 in St Andrew’s East, a small town in Quebec, she was raised by her grandmother, her father having abandoned the family shortly before her birth and her mother having died shortly after it. In her senior year of high school she won a scholarship to McGill University, from which she obtained a bachelor’s degree in Arts in 1890. After being refused entry to the McGill Medical School, which did not accept women, she attended Bishop’s College, a relatively small institution with a medical...

Sénac, Peacock, Rokitansky, and Keith, one after the other, richly advanced our knowledge of congenital heart disease, but it was left to Maude Abbott, fired by a spark from Osier, to make the subject one of such general and widespread interest that we no longer regard it with either disdain or awe as a mystery for the autopsy table alone to discover and to solve. She has been the most important of the pioneers in establishing congenital heart disease as a living part of clinical medicine.

For a long time the medical world has awaited a textbook on congenital heart...

This volume presents, in a somewhat unusual form, a pictorial retrospect of the author’s personal experience in what may now be considered a specialized field of clinicopathological research. A first-hand knowledge of the exact morphology of a large range of cardiac anomalies, obtained in the first place through an intensive early study of the rich material accumulated under the author’s care as Curator of the Medical Museum of McGill University, has been continuously applied and amplified through more than three decades of activity, by observation of congenital heart disease in the wards and autopsy rooms of many great hospitals both...

An understanding of the elementary facts of human and comparative embryology is essential to an intelligent grasp of the ontogenetic problems of congenital cardiac disease. In the light of a knowledge of the successive stages through which the mammalian heart passes in its evolution from its primitive tubular state to the completely divided four-chambered organ conducting a double circulation, the most bizarre combinations of defects can usually be interpreted quite simply, as due to early arrests of development, marked it may be by ingenious structural adaptations of growth. The critical period in the human subject lies between the fifth and...

The clinical significance of cardiac anomalies depends upon the pathological physiology of the altered circulation as induced by the defect. This may be of the nature of a simple mechanical obstruction which leads directly to undue strain at exposed points, but in which there isno abnormal communicationbetween the systemic and pulmonary circulations and therefore no cause for cyanosis is present (Group I; Fig. 1). Or, secondly, an anomalous aperture may exist in the form of alocalized, uncomplicateddefect in the cardiac or aortic septa, through which, so long as the pressure remains physiologically higher on the left...