Demystification of the Heart
by Dr. S. Amjad Hussain
“All our actions take their hue from the complexion of the heart as
landscapes their variety from light.”
From the dawn of civilization, the heart has ruled supreme. It has been described as the center of the soul and the seat of our deepest emotions. Now it is called a four-chambered muscular pump, an elegant and efficient biological machine. We can measure its function, diagnose a leaky valve, and calculate the dimensions of a narrowed valve. We can probe its electrical system just as an electrician locates and traces a malfunctioning wire buried deep in a wall. But somewhere during this relentless pursuit of scientific inquiry, we have lost the mystique surrounding this noble organ. Macbeth spoke of his palpitation when he said that it “make[s] my seated heart knock at my ribs/against the use of nature”. The thought of translating these words into scientific jargon is enough to pain any heart.
To call the heart a mere pump is to demean it. It is like calling Michelangelo’s Pieta a carved chunk of marble, or a stirring sitar concerto a mere combination of musical notes. Or evaluating a painting of Picasso by analyzing paint pigment and the nature of hair in his paintbrush. It demystifies and reduces timeless pieces of art. Could the hand of God do any less when sculpting a heart?
Claude Bernard, the 19th century French scientist, coined the term “internal environment” for the ocean within our bodies. It is a universe in itself. A delicate balance of good and evil keeps our body in proper function. Like a symphony, the parts of the body act in unison and harmony to create the music we call life. A drop of a few pH points in our blood is lethal. The organs talk to each other via cryptic messages, making it possible for us to carry on the tune. How can one describe this communication among organs across the vast expanse of body fluids? Cell mediators, hormones, enzymes, self-regulatory mechanisms? Maybe. But they must talk to each other in more elegant language than our scientific vocabulary can muster.
I wonder how an artificial heart would fit into this meta-physical landscape. How would the minds of Barney Clark and William Schroeder, the first recipients of heart transplants, talk with their plastic and steel contraption called the Jarvik-7? Othello could have been talking about Clark or Schroeder when he described his suffering: “My heart is turned to stone; I strike it, and it hurts my hand.”
Faiz Ahmad Faiz (Image source: Wikipedia)
Faiz Ahmad Faiz, perhaps the greatest Urdu poet of the past century, wrote this poem about his own heart attack:
There was such pain that night my maddened spirit
Was on fire wrestling with every living fiber,
Gushing out through every pore.
1st seemed as far off in your green bower
The leaves all dripping with my agonized blood
Were sickening of the moon’s beauty...
As if this body were a desert,
All these wracked nerves its tent ropes,
One after one slackening,
Warning of life’s caravan making ready for departure...
Somewhere in memory’s dying candlelight
A momentary vision, a last glimpse of your tenderness;
But even with that, there was so much pain, 1 wanted to be done with—
Or I wanted to stay, but my spirit would not.
He felt, to put it in cold, naked scientific words, severe chest pains. Science has yet to coin parallel metaphors for memory’s dying candlelight, wracked nerves as tent ropes, life’s caravan and spirit. Science has yet to understand feelings and emotions. It can dissect, to expose the bare truth. In doing so, at times, it turns the subtle into gross and the sensual into burlesque. But it can’t measure that which exists but does not lend itself to being sized, weighed, or measured. Most of what philosophers think, artists paint, authors write, and musicians play remains immeasurable by scientific tools. I believe the same is true when we speak of the subtleties of the heart.
Bearing Figure with Amphora by Howard Ben Tre (Image source: The Toledo Museum of Art)
Poet Charles Siebert lamented the demystification of the heart. “We may be suffering”, he wrote in Harper’s Magazine, “a kind of collective heart attack, a modern metaphysical one—pained by the weakening of long-held notions of the heart as the home of the soul and the seat of deep emotions.”
For many of us sentimental fools who straddle the fence between science and literature, accepting the heart as a mere four-chambered muscular organ will not do.
Let the heart surgeons continue to reroute blocked and clogged arteries and replace the trap-door valves of this four-chambered pump. Let the cardiologists and electrophysiologists probe its intricate electrical system to find an errant or broken wire and fix it by implanting artificial pacemakers. But permit me the folly of still calling the heart what poets and writers have always called it—the home of the soul and the seat of our deepest emotions.
Sources
Faiz, Faiz Ahmad. (1971). Poems by Faiz Ahmad Faiz. (V. Kiernan, Trans.). Vanguard Books, South Publications.
Seibert, Charles. (1990, Feb). The rehumanization of the heart. Harper’s Magazine.
Shakespeare, William. (1606). Macbeth.
Shakespeare, William. (1603). Othello.
Dr. S. Amjad Hussain holds emeritus professorships in cardiovascular surgery and humanities at the UTCOMLS. He is most recently the author of A Tapestry of Medicine and Life.
