The Doctor's Heart Attack

"Everybody in the club used to want to tell me about his heart attack. Now I'm in the club, and I want to talk about mine." The speaker was not the usual coronary victim, but one of the U.S.'s leading experts on heart and artery diseases. Dr. Irvine H. Page (TIME cover, Oct. 31, 1955) has spent a working lifetime studying problems of the circulatory system as president of the American Heart Association in 1955 and research director of the Cleveland Clinic until 1966. Last week, at 66, he told fellow cardiologists at the association's annual meeting in San Francisco what had happened to him.

Last June, still working as research director emeritus at the Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Page spent a full day working on project reports. That evening, he suddenly felt as if he had a fire in his chest, "much stronger than heartburn," he recalls. "The pain tends to disappear when you hold your breath hard and bear down. I knew I'd had a heart attack. In the four months since then, I've experienced first hand the problems that I'd been studying for years."

Since 1930, Dr. Page has concentrated his research on the causes and treatment of high blood pressure; his own reading of 128/78 early in 1967 gave him no warning. Far from being overweight, Dr. Page was a model of slimness, at 146 lbs. on a 5-ft. 10 1/2-in. frame. He had never gorged himself on marbled steaks and pie `a la mode, and since 1959 had spartanized his diet to approximately that used in his own DietHeart Study. Dr. Page was a moderate social drinker. He smoked scarcely half a pack a day. He tried to maintain a reasonable level of exercise by using the stairs instead of the elevator every time he had to go up two flights or down three. He tried to find time for tennis, playing sedate doubles.

"Type A" Type. What had he done wrong? "I came to realize," said Dr. Page, "that I had not been living moderately. I worked hard. I was continually dissatisfied, and I always tried to drive myself harder. Although I've told a thousand audiences not to use stimulants, I was up to ten cups of coffee a day, trying to squeeze the last bit of efficiency out of myself."

It was not overwork that laid Dr. Page low. It was not even stress, as commonly understood. It was, as he now acknowledges, what other cardiologists at San Francisco defined as a "Type A" personality--characterized by the drive and competitiveness that compels some to take on more tasks than they should ("Type B" types take things much more easily). Dr. Page had previously paid little attention to the relation between personality and heart disease. Now he recognizes that there was a Type A factor in his own attack.

"The competitor never understands when he has had enough," he says. "It was this sort of drive in my case." After the fact, he has reformed, now puts emphasis on the title "emeritus." He quit smoking. For exercise, he jogs in place beside his bed each morning, then performs calisthenics. He plans to resume tennis next spring, already takes regular walks. "And walking," he added at week's end on vacation in Hyannis, Mass., "is becoming increasingly possible because I no longer give a damn whether I get somewhere in a hurry or not."

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