Charcot testified 110 years ago to a fundamental truth in medicine:

“Disease is very old, and nothing about it has changed. it is we who change as we learn what was formerly imperceptible.”

In ancient Grecian yore, when Hermes, son of Zeus and bearer of the Caduceus, was the heavenly messenger to mediate between the gods and man, the “embolon” was recognized as a mortal peril. Such ram, undetected beneath the waterline of the prow of an ancient warship, could be driven with hydraulic force into an unwary enemy vessel often with catastrophic or fatal effect.

Even today, the threat of sudden death from a pulmonary embolus - the clot which migrates from a source of origin on the inner wall of a vein to lodge in and thereby plug an artery within the lung - remains a major medical and surgical risk. Thrombosis and thrombophlebitis of the deep veins of the legs, often unpreventable and frequently undetectable clinically, are the nidus of a potentially fatal pulmonary embolism.