He died of a larynx-related illness in MountVernon, Va., on Dec. 14, 1799, at age 67, nearly 3 years after completing his second term as President.Assume that medical practice in George Washington's day had paralleled that of the 21st century. Washington's physician would have had his medical records on file, complete with his personal and family history, physical examination findings, and test results. Such a record would have shown that although Washington's mother had survived until the then-exceptional age of 82, his inheritance with respect to health was otherwise essentially poor. Members of the Washington family were generally short-lived. George's great-grandfather John Washington died at age 46, his grandfather Lawrence at 38, and his father Augustine at 49. An impressive array of illnessesWashington's strong and stalwart appearance notwithstanding, his personal medical history included an impressive array of illnesses, some of them serious. Once he was grown, the earliest entry in his chart would probably have been made in November 1751, when at age 19 he was "strongly attacked with the Small Pox" during his stay on the island of Barbados in the West Indies. 1 Soon after Washington returned to America in March 1752, he suffered an attack of pleurisy. Aware of young Washington's exposure to tuberculosis, with which his brother Lawrence had been afflicted, his physician might have suspected that George had also contracted this malady and had eventually overcome it over a period of years. Auscultation and x-ray might have detected the presence of healed scar tissue or an active lesion.The recurrent chills and fever that had plagued Washington at intervals of many years and that mercifully

These data are consistent with the hypothesis that the combined negative voltage shift in the plateau and increase in its duration lead to the genesis of low membrane potential EADs by allowing reactivation of Ca2+ channels. Moreover, these results suggest that bradycardia-dependent EADs in Purkinje tissue may underlie arrhythmias in the intact heart during reperfusion of ischemic myocardium by mechanisms that are related in part to the acidosis established during the preceding ischemic conditions.

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Primary carcinoma of the appendix, though rare, occurs often enough to warrant its inclusion in diagnostic possibilities when the symptoms of acute appendicitis, without leukocytosis, are present in geriatric patients. A case of mucinous adenocarcinoma of the appendix in an 88-year-old white woman is presented. The substantial relief following right hemicolectomy has persisted for several months of follow-up.

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