The Council for High Blood Pressure Research. Its origin and purposes.

T is all but impossible for the modern generation of scientists and clinicians to understand the abysmal ignorance before the 1940s with regard to the mechanism and treatments of arterial hypertension. The majority of physicians worldwide did not consider hypertension of major importance. That it could produce stroke and myocardial, renal, and vascular disease was suspected bijt not widely accepted. Some still believed, when they thought about it at all, that lowering blood pressure would reduce renal blood flow and lead to uremia! The causal relationship to stroke was vaguely perceived but lowering average blood pressure to prevent stroke was rarely considered. Since the time of Bright, renal disease had been believed to be associated mainly with a "hardened pulse" (which we now know as hypertension), but no attempt was made to relieve it. Some confusion occurred more recently when George Pickering stressed the idea that hypertension was not a disease but simply the expression of the upper end of the blood pressure scale — a quantitative, not a qualitative, aberration.