An investigation into the human heart by a distinguished cardiologist, exploring representations of the heart and how our understanding of its function has developed over 2,500 years.

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.

About the Author

Robin Choudhury is Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Oxford and a practising cardiologist. His clinical expertise is in the treatment of heart attack and he also runs a laboratory working on molecular and cellular mechanisms of heart injury and repair. He has a particular interest in the role of 'inflammation' in cardiovascular diseases. He is a Fellow of Balliol College and of the Royal College of Physicians, and is a former Wellcome Senior Research Fellow. He has published over 200 academic papers and book chapters. He is co-editor of the Handbook of Cardiology Emergencies (OUP); and contributor to the Oxford Textbook of Medicine (OUP). In 2013, he led a group at the Oxford Acute Vascular Imaging Centre (of which he was founding director) using MRI to test, for the first time in a living subject, the 500-year-old theories of Leonardo da Vinci on the movement of blood across the aortic valve.

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