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(Stroke. 2009;40:e53.)
© 2009 American Heart Association, Inc.

Special Report

Personal Reflections From a Front-Row Seat at the Greatest Show on Earth (Life)

Part II (Stroke Research Commentary)

From the University of Western Ontario (Professor Emeritus), and the Robarts Research Institute (Scientist Emeritus), Ontario, Canada.

Correspondence to Henry JM Barnett, Professor Emeritus University of Western Ontario, Scientist Emeritus Robarts Research Institute, 14865 Concession 7, King City, Ontario, Canada L7B1K4. E-mail hjmb@sympatico.ca.

Key Words: acute stroke

An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract.

	Introduction

 
Part I of this discussion of my 65 years since graduating from medical school covered my reasons for being in medicine at all, my explanation for the theatrical terms in the earlier para-scientific document, and finally the effect of World War II on my career.¹

Part II will attempt to touch on the privileged life I led in the field of stroke prevention research. In its entirety it is designed as a story or tale about my 50 years in medical practice and does not follow the standard format of a scientific paper.

Previously I alluded to the ongoing prejudicial custom of critical attempts to resist new ideas in scientific endeavor. I gave as examples the discordant behavior in Toronto that greeted the discovery of insulin and of less far-reaching consequence my own attempts to convince Canadian and American colleagues that there were 5 distinct causal mechanisms leading to syringomyelia. Surgeons in Cleveland and Boston were adamant that there was but one. Postmortem studies and now routine MR studies prove them wrong.

	New Insights Into Previously Unrecognized Causes of Stroke

 
My next contribution of a controversial nature was a description of a group of young patients with stroke whose causes we defined in a study with age and gender-matched controls as being due to emboli associated with mitral valve prolapse and to suggest that this was a clinically overlooked cause of cerebral ischemic events.² Denials of variable vehemence appeared but the accumulating pathological and surgical data were quite incontrovertible. Ultimately in an Olmstead County prevalence study its occurrence . . . [Full Text of this Article]