A Heart Surgeon's View of the Heart

In this excerpt from Reinhard Friedl's The Source of All Things, the author introduces his facination with the heart. 

Most of the time you don’t hear it, but if your heartbeat were suddenly to stop, you’d stop too. You live from one beat to the next. In between, death resides. If after one heartbeat there isn’t another, the clock of life stands still. It might happen while we’re sleeping — or shopping. None of us knows the hour of our death.

Your heartbeat is my profession. Sixty to eighty times per minute, this sound creates life. Most hearts beat calmly and strongly, some in a constant rush. Even if the heart stumbles occasionally, it always tries to go on. I have seen many hearts laboring with their last ounce of strength. The heart knows no weekend, no holiday. On your seventy-fifth birthday, it will have beaten about three billion times. It started its work eight months before your birth, twenty- two days after procreation. The heart is the first organ to develop, long before the brain and the first breath. Nothing works without the heart. It throbs through the years and decades, unnoticed—until something ceases to function. Or until a high-tech scan, by accident, discovers a defect that has not yet been felt.

Afflictions of the heart are always dramatic. A pain in the chest is completely different from a pain in the hip. We perceive everything to do with the heart as an attack on our lives, on our inviolability. Even if later it turns out not to be life-threatening, an aching heart is a cause for concern and often triggers a fear of dying. A headache can also be a harbinger of danger; it can eventually lead to death by stroke or brain hemorrhage. Yet a severe headache worries us less than a light pressure in the chest. Deep inside, human beings sense that the heart is the source of all life.

As a heart surgeon I have held thousands of hearts in my hands. I have operated on premature babies and repaired the heart valves of patients well advanced in years. I have implanted artificial hearts and stitched up knife wounds to the heart. As an organ, the heart has been investigated down to its smallest parts. We seem to know everything about it—and yet we know nothing. Every week there are hundreds of new scientific findings published about this organ that has not changed since Homo sapiens emerged 300,000 years ago. It seems that the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal is still correct: “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.”

All great cultures, from the Stone Age to the present, and all religions and spiritual movements perceived and continue to perceive the heart as a symbol, as the biological center for love...

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