Outpourings of the heart

The numbers invite awe: three billion beats in a lifetime; 100,000 miles of vessels. But on the hospital floor, wonder is often in short supply. Doctors forget how intimate their examinations and investigations can be. Stethoscope to chest. Order a blood test.

I remember on a morning ward round at medical school, our consultant wanted to check that the oximeter was working (a device which measures heart rate and blood oxygenation through the nail bed). He asked a harassed junior doctor to present her forefinger. The screen’s digits betrayed her stress levels. She was clinically tachycardic. Her pulse was so fast it would have been worrying had it been the patient’s. I have not forgotten this uninvited invasion of her heart. Although we now know that Galenic humours aren’t to be found in blood, and that the heart is not the seat of emotion, they remain physiological sources where our feelings and life stories can be read.

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Ameer Kotecha

Lindt has cheapened itself

Sandeep Jauhar, a New York cardiologist, knows it’s possible to die of a broken heart. He describes how distress can cause our beating pump to change shape. Part-memoir, part-history of his medical specialty, Heart links the physical organ with the emotional one. Jauhar pairs engaging descriptions of how the heart works with tales of creativity and self-experimentation that enabled treatments for infarctions, arrhythmias and myopathies. It was the first I’d heard of the electrical engineer, Wilson Greatbatch, who blew his $2,000 savings to make the first implantable pacemaker. Today, that device metronomes one million hearts all over the world. These histories circulate around stories of Jauhar’s patients, his family and his own health fears. Aged 45, he finds himself staring at a CT scan that shows partial blockages in his coronary arteries. ‘I felt as if I were getting a glimpse of how I was probably going to die,’ he writes.