Haqvin Malmros, MD

1895 — 1995

Haqvin Malmros of Malmö and the University of Lund, Sweden, was an internist in the classical mold, trained in the biochemistry of diseases and having a keen interest in nutrition and metabolism. In 1950, he published a report about the spectacular wartime changes in CVD deaths in Scandinavia (Malmros 1950). He made the important assumption that diagnostic custom and medical care changed little in Scandinavia during World War II; therefore, the dramatic downward trend in reported CVD mortality of the war years was probably real. Malmros’s report had an abrupt and wide influence. His and others wartime observations led, as had the early Russian experimental findings, to a greatly renewed interest in the dietary and environmental influences on atherosclerosis.

Malmros attended Keys’s 1954 gathering of experts in Naples and also the Symposium on Atherosclerosis hosted in Minneapolis in 1955, and became an international figure in the new epidemiological approach to understanding cardiovascular diseases. (HB)