Eugene’s Anecdote, “He was a 20 year old man who I thought had an anomaly—a congenital membrane that was obstructing the outflow from the left ventricle. He was scheduled for open heart surgery. The day he was being operated on, I was in the lab doing a cardiac catheterization, and I got a call: “Dr. Morrow wants you to come to the OR immediately.” Open heart surgery was just beginning—it was a big deal. There were 40 people in the OR—surgical assistants, a gaggle of anesthesiologists, many nurses, pump technicians, X ray technicians. And there was Morrow, operating on this patient. And he said to me, “There's no obstruction in the heart. I've put one finger through the aortic valve and the other through the left atrium and they're meeting. How could this have happened?” Totally devastated. I didn't know what I could do. I hung around for a few minutes and then I said, “Glenn, I have a patient on the table downstairs in the cath lab. I've got to get back.” And—in retrospect, this was the key thing—I said, “If you get his heart started, please stick a needle into the left ventricle and measure the pressure.” So, I went back to the cath lab and finished the case. Glenn Morrow came down a couple of hours later and said, “I got him off the pump. I measured the pressure, it was high. There was an obstruction. Let's sit down and talk about it.” He was no longer feeling angry, maybe a little apologetic for reaming me out publicly. We talked about it every day and we tried to come up with theories. After about 3 weeks, he said, “Enough. It's time to move on.” That's the way matters were for another week. And then the same thing repeated itself in another patient. With the second case it was, “Okay—we're on to something new.” More here: http://www.clinchem.org/content/58/1/11.long

, In all fairness Braunwald later realized that the first patient with HCM was described (less famously) in 1869: More here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4239819/