The most famous cardiologist of the twentieth century said he never heard of a heart attack until after he left medical school, and he left medical school in 1911.
Paul Dudley White. Eisenhower's doctor. Founder of the American Heart Association's science.
His own words: when he graduated in 1911 he had never heard of coronary thrombosis, and none of his teachers thought it worth a lecture.
James Herrick described the heart attack in 1912, in Chicago, in the journal of the American Medical Association, and later said the paper fell like a dud. Nobody could see why it mattered. Nobody was seeing the disease.
By 1921 heart disease was the leading cause of death in America.
By 1960 it was killing more men in their fifties than every cancer combined.
Between the dud paper and the epidemic, one thing entered the American kitchen that had never been in any kitchen before.
Crisco, 1911. Cottonseed oil, hydrogenated, in a tin with a cookbook.
Corn oil, soybean oil, margarine, the fryer.
Butter and lard had been on that table for four hundred years, and the doctors had four hundred years of not needing a word for what happened next.
A disease that had no name in 1911 got its own hospital wing by 1960.
The fat they blamed was the fat that was there the whole time. The fat they missed arrived the year the doctor graduated.