The Beating Heart: The Art and Science of Our Most Vital Organ

(Hardback)

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The heart has been portrayed in art and texts from Ancient Egypt, China and India. In Western religious and secular art, images of the heart denoting all manner of passions were abundant from the Middle Ages on. Even in the modern era, in which its function is fully understood, the hearts place in the language, idiom and art of popular culture remains undiminished. In The Beating Heart, Robin Choudhury explores how the heart has been represented over time and across cultures. He investigates the interplay between the heart depictions of successive eras and the prevailing cultural discourse religious, social, philosophical of each. In parallel, he considers how the scientific understanding of the function of the heart has unfolded over 2,500 years, from the observations of Aristotle, through detailed anatomical descriptions beginning in the Renaissance, to the emergence of experimental physiology in the 17th century, culminating in the 20th in full understanding of the molecular and cellular processes by which the heart beats autonomously. The Beating Heart is a beautifully illustrated journey of discovery across four millennia of human history, in the company of an author whose medical knowledge of the heart is matched by his fascination with the visual arts.

Author Bio

Robin Choudhury is Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Oxford and a practising cardiologist. His clinical expertise is in the treatment of heart attack and he also runs a laboratory working on molecular and cellular mechanisms of heart injury and repair. He has a particular interest in the role of inflammation in cardiovascular diseases. He is a Fellow of Balliol College and of the Royal College of Physicians, and is a former Wellcome Senior Research Fellow. He has published over 200 academic papers and book chapters. He is co-editor of the Handbook of Cardiology Emergencies (OUP); and contributor to the Oxford Textbook of Medicine (OUP). In 2013, he led a group at the Oxford Acute Vascular Imaging Centre (of which he was founding director) using MRI to test, for the first time in a living subject, the 500-year-old theories of Leonardo da Vinci on the movement of blood across the aortic valve.