Sandeep Jauhar: How Your Emotions Change the Shape of Your Heart
Selected Excerpts
“No other organ, perhaps no other object in human life, is as imbued with metaphor and meaning as the human heart. Over the course of history, the heart has been a symbol of our emotional lives. It was considered by many to be the seat of the soul, the repository of the emotions.”
“When Barney Clark, a retired dentist with end-stage heart failure, received the first permanent artificial heart in Utah in 1982, his wife of 39 years reportedly asked the doctors, "Will he still be able to love me?"”
“Today, the care of the heart has become less the province of philosophers, who dwell upon the heart's metaphorical meanings, and more the domain of doctors like me, wielding technologies that even a century ago, because of the heart's exalted status in human culture, were considered taboo. In the process, the heart has been transformed from an almost supernatural object imbued with metaphor and meaning into a machine that can be manipulated and controlled. But this is the key point: these manipulations, we now understand, must be complemented by attention to the emotional life that the heart, for thousands of years, was believed to contain.”
Discussion Questions
Jauhar’s TED Talk discusses the centuries-old metaphorical significance of the heart as a symbol for our emotional lives. In what ways is that metaphorical significance still present in modern medicine?
Even in our modern era of evidence-based medicine, the longstanding metaphorical significance of the heart as the seat of emotion, passion, and love is here to stay. How might our understandings of the heart as metaphor and machine complement each other, or are they at odds?
Reflections from #MedHumChat
“I think that it's still present because our emotions are often associated with physical sensations. We feel physical pain when we're "heartbroken," get nauseous when we're scared or worried, & feel tingly when we're excited. They're inexorably linked.” —@DianaCejasMD
“The Heart feels like it’s the seat of our emotions which control it- like the Heart is a puppet pulled by strings(chordae tendinae) sometimes having chest pain is denied because the emotional disbelief that the center of our being (the heart) is threatened.” —@iamritu
“As a psychiatry resident, there are countless examples. The most prominent one I see is in patients with PTSD. We discuss how they will carry around their hypervigilance in their chest, almost as if they are waiting for the "other shoe to drop".” —@ALelinMD
“"His/her heart's just not in it" is a way we talk about patients who seem to have resigned themselves to illness, death, etc.” —@allison_tandem
About this #MedHumChat
“How Your Emotions Change the Shape of Your Heart” was joined with “[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in],” a poem by e.e. cummings and “Darkness before Dawn,” a chapter in Haider Warrich’s book State of the Heart: Exploring the History, Science, and Future of Cardiac Disease for a #MedHumChat discussion November 20, 2019 exploring The Heart: Metaphor and Machine.
This chat was co-sponsored by Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes (@CircOutcomes), an American Heart Association journal.
We were honored to be joined by special guests Haider Warraich and Sandeep Jauhar. Haider Warraich, MD (@haiderwarraich) is the Associate Director of Heart Failure at the Boston Veterans Affairs Hospital, Associate Physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Instructor at Harvard Medical School as well as the author of State of the Heart.
The pieces for this chat, along with the discussions questions, were selected by Ritu Thamman.
About the Author
Sandeep Jauhar, MD (@sjauhar) is a cardiologist, NY Times columnist, and author of Heart: A History.