Matters of the Heart

Matters of the Heart

History, Medicine and Emotion

Fay Bound Alberti

* * * * *

Oxford University Press

240pp £26

ISBN 978 0 19 954097-6

In late medieval Europe a devotion to the heart of Jesus developed around an image of a heart surrounded by flames and often represented visually outside and apart from his body. During the Counter-Reformation this devotion became particularly popular among ascetics and mystics, men and women alike, and it grew into a global cult through the work of missionaries. Yet this idealised, symmetrical, very red and burning heart is little different from the one we see all around us, on advertising hoardings, on greeting cards, as jewellery and as graffiti on walls. More than any other part of the human body, the heart has remained that emblematic shape, which surpasses its origins in the religious imagination. More than any other organ it has defied reshaping by medicine. Even as cardiology and its surgical feats have remade the heart – transplants, bypasses, stents – we are still attached to a much older notion of it: its shape, its location and its meaning for human identity.

Fay Bound Alberti’s short and highly readable book aims to illuminate these conundrums. Her approach is historical, ranging from the Greeks to modern medicine, to demonstrate the changes which have occurred over the centuries in the scientific understanding of the heart. Since the 18th century the heart has been emptied of its emotional content, which modern science associates with the brain and nervous system. Yet, outside the realm of science, people are still attached to the symbol of the heart, with their heartache, heartbreak and gestures towards the left side of the chest as a site of emotion. Matters of the Heart reveals the strong desire to maintain – in the face of knowledge – symbols of emotion that are defiantly unscientific. Despite everything we now know, we still make fools of ourselves when it comes to the heart.