James Hope (physician)

James Hope (1801–1841) was an English physician. He has been called "the first cardiologist in the modern sense". He is known for discovering the early diastolic murmur of mitral stenosis in 1829.

He was born at in Cheshire 23 February 1801, the son of Thomas Hope, merchant and manufacturer, he of Prestbury Hall near Macclesfield. After four years (1815–18) at Macclesfield grammar school, James resided for about 18 months at Oxford, where his elder brother was then an undergraduate, but never became a member of the university.

In October 1820 Hope went as a medical student to Edinburgh University, where he studied for five years. The subject of his inaugural medical dissertation (August 1825) was aneurism of the aorta, and he then began a collection of drawings of pathological specimens coming under his notice. A president of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh, he held the posts of house-physician and house-surgeon at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.

Leaving Edinburgh in December 1825, Hope became a medical student at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London, and in the spring of 1826 obtained the diploma of the Royal College of Surgeons. That summer he left England for the continent, and stayed a year at Paris as one of the clinical clerks of Auguste François Chomel at the Hôpital de la Charité. He then visited Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands, and returned England in June 1828. In September he became a licentiate the Royal College of Physicians.

Hope went into medical practice in December 1828 in Lower Seymour Street, Portman Square, London, and entered himself as a pupil at St. George's Hospital, where he was one of the early champions of auscultation. "He described a soft early diastolic murmur due to mitral stenosis and was the first to distinguiish it from the diastolic murmur of aortic reflux. It was once called Hope's murmur." In 1829 he established a private dispensary linked to the Portman Square and Harley Street district visiting societies. In 1831 he was elected physician to the Marylebone Infirmary, where he had charge of ninety beds. In the autumn of 1832 he delivered at his own home a course of lectures, intended for practitioners only, on diseases of the chest. He afterwards lectured at St. George's Hospital, where he was elected assistant physician in 1834, and at the Aldersgate Street School of Medicine.

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