This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Cardiovascular System, Other  • Alert me on articles by topic

By Ole M. Høystad, translated by John Irons, 254 pp, $29.95.
London, England, Reaktion Books, 2007.
ISBN-10 1-86189-311-6.

JAMA. 2007;298:1806-1807.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

For an organ that normally weighs a mere 300 g, the human heart packs plenty of punch. Crunch the numbers—approximately 100 000 beats and 8000 gallons of blood pumped daily. Even the heart's anatomy, tagged with names that are exquisite and peculiar enough to be at home in a haiku—chordae tendineae, myofibrils, foramen ovale, and valve leaflets—is astonishing. Yet the importance of the heart goes beyond its form and function. As a symbol, the human heart has personal, cultural, and universal meaning. Can there be any doubt that the heart is the principal symbol of our humanity? A History of the Heart is a scholarly examination of this organ's crucial role in history, literature, art, mythology, music, philosophy, and religion.

The book does not, however, provide much medical history of the heart. Although some anatomists and physicians including Hippocrates, Galen, William Harvey, and Christian Barnard are mentioned in the text, other . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Tony Miksanek, MD, Reviewer
Benton, Illinois
tmiksanek@aol.com