ABSTRACT
The experimental study of blood lipids and atherosclerosis was started by Anitschow in 1913.8
He confidently stated that ‘there can be no atheroma without cholesterol’, neatly upstaging all subsequent work in the area. Familial hypercholesterolaemia was first clearly described in life with serum cholesterol measurements by Burns in 1920,9 though earlier attempts had been made to study the genetic transmission of xanthomata.10 Even before that, the nutritional debate had been initiated by de Langen (1916), who had observed a much lower blood cholesterol in the Javanese than in the Dutch, Germans and French, and attributed this to diet.11
