The Beating Heart

Author: Robin Choudhury

History of medicine | Cardiovascular medicine

Published on 10^th October 2024 by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (Apollo) in the United Kingdom.

Hardback | 304 pages, 90 integrated colour and bw images
168mm x 246mm x 31mm | 726g

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 seventeenth century, culminating in the twentieth 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.