Cardiac Pathology: Rheumatic heart disease: Mitral stenosis: Atrial thrombus

A 1934 autopsy specimen from a 42 year old woman who was attending St. Thomas' Hospital from the age of 14 to 21, for rheumatic heart disease. She was in and out of hospital with attacks of fibrillation and heart failure for the next twenty years. She then started to have attacks of pain on exercise and one day fell off her chair, being unable to get up owing to paralysis of the left leg and arm. She developed embolic lesions of the abdomen, left leg and right arm, dying quietly four weeks after her CVA.