History
Drs. James E. Pennington and Bernard Lown's cardiology group at Harvard University are credited with formalizing this technique in the medical literature. They published their report in the New England Journal of Medicine in the early 1970s. Drs. Richard S. Crampton and George Craddock, cardiologists at the University of Virginia helped to promote the paramedic use of chest thump through a curious accident. In 1970, the Charlottesville-Albemarle Rescue Squad (VA) was transporting a patient with an unstable cardiac rhythm in what was then called a Mobile Coronary Care Unit. When the vehicle inadvertently hit a speed bump in a shopping center parking lot, the patient's normal heart rhythm was restored. Further research confirmed that chest thumping patients with life-threatening arrhythmias could save lives .
Read more about this topic: Precordial Thump
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“The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)