Galen’s physiology, which dominated European medicine until the Renaissance, viewed the heart as a source of heat rather than as a pump. It was not until 1628, when William Harvey’s De Motu Cordis described the circulation, that heart failure could be understood in terms of abnormal hemodynamics. Autopsies carried out as early as the 16th century included descriptions of heart disease, but initially these were generally “two or three lines of symptomatology and four or five lines of gross autopsy findings.” Théophile Bonet’s Sepulchretum, published in 1679, noted sudden death in a man with calcific aortic stenosis, and dyspnea in a patient with a diseased heart, but provided no hemodynamic explanations for the clinical findings. Harvey himself wrote little about disease, but did observe that venous occlusion leads to edema and that impaired cardiac pumping can cause dyspnea by reducing blood flow through the lungs...