Jacob Mendes Da Costa

Jacob Mendes Da Costa was an American physician born on 7 February 1833 on Saint Thomas in the Danish Virgin Islands, into the island's small Sephardi Jewish community. He left the island at the age of four for mainland Europe, where he attended gymnasium, and he first hoped for a career in the foreign service until his mother encouraged him toward medicine. He took his medical degree at Jefferson Medical College in 1852. During the American Civil War he served as a physician at the Military Hospital and at Turner's Lane Hospital in Philadelphia, where he gathered the observations behind his 1871 study of what became known as Da Costa's syndrome, or soldier's heart, an anxiety disorder combining effort fatigue, dyspnea, sighing respiration, palpitation and sweating. He later taught at Jefferson Medical College as a respected lecturer, and he held that a gifted physician needs both science and the humanities. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1866 and died on 12 September 1900.