BOOK REVIEW : Darwin ’ s Heart
Author : Morris Weiss Jr ., MD , FACP , FACC Author House ( April 2023 )
Review by MARY BARRY , MD
Dr . Weiss , a longstanding pillar of cardiological excellence , in practice over 60 years here in downtown Louisville at Jewish Hospital , has long studied , cared for and admired the heart . In his own heart , he is an archeologist , and has written this book to excavate the myriad ways that humans of many eras have probed its mysteries .
He opens with this request from the widow of an artificial heart recipient : “ Find whatever is left of my husband ’ s heart and put it back in his chest .” He was struck by the pathos of this , by the intensely intimate need for a wife to know that her beloved ’ s heart was inside him still , the heartbeat that she had held close for thousands of days and nights .
He felt impelled to explore the ways various peoples of all eras had viewed the heart . Dr . Weiss ( universally known as Moose ) has long been fascinated by ancient civilizations , and he began to study the heart as understood by our various ancestors , as not just the pump , but the symbolic heart . He notes that in each heart we can find good and evil , light and dark , joy and sorrow . Our hearts hold our emotional home .
Moose has been fascinated by archeological pursuits from a young age . He has traveled far and wide in search of other cultures , other glories of art and invention , other temples of learning . In ancient Egypt , the heart was considered a well , not a pump , and the heart of the pharaoh was a conduit to the gods . Egyptians got embalmed , but the heart was never , ever removed : it held the path to the afterlife , so scarabs ( messages to the afterlife ) were placed close to the heart . The Egyptian might , in the morning , pray , “ May I have power in my heart , arms and legs .” In Hebrew , the heart is called levou , but when discussing the heart as the abode of the soul , it is named rooach . The Biblical rabbis and prophets , he says , regarded the heart as “ the seat of the intellect , emotion and understanding ,” not as the circulatory pump .
The Chinese physician Mencius , from the fourth century B . C . E ., believed that human nature was good and that one ’ s vital energy or qi is stored there as the source of moral rightness . In the Quran , Mohammed says that tranquility of the heart comes through acknowledging the love of the Creator . Moose notes that our religious traditions “ grant the heart a symbolic power to be
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