The Curious History of the Heart: A Cultural and Scientific Journey

This wide-ranging debut by cardiologist Figueredo charts how scientific and popular understandings of the human heart have changed over time. Examining “how the ‘king’ of the organs became dismissed as a mere mechanistic blood pump,” he starts with the earliest known heart, found in a 520-million-year-old fossilized “prehistoric shrimp.” Figueredo notes that humans of antiquity believed the heart was the “seat of the soul, emotions, thoughts, and intelligence,” discussing St. Augustine’s writings about the “divine spark” within the heart and the Aztecs’ annual ritual of removing the heart of a living young man to offer to the gods. There may be an element of truth to this antiquated understanding, he contends; research suggests grief-related stress can physically deform the heart, and in one unusual case, a 47-year-old dancer, after a heart transplantation, manifested traits of her teenage donor. The author surveys the ways in which the heart/emotion association persists in popular culture, from Twitter’s heart-shaped “like” button to the heart’s ubiquity in popular song lyrics. The research on the “heart-brain connection” complicates modern understandings of the heart as purely mechanical, and the synthesis of history, science, and culture enlightens. Provocative and broad in scope, this offers much food for thought. (Apr.)