The Sublime Engine
A Biography of the Human Heart
by Stephen Amidon
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Pub. Ed. $25.99
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The Sublime Engine
“The heart has reasons that reason does not understand,” wrote Jacques Benigne Bossuel. Yet for centuries, humanity has attempted to use reason to understand the organ that circulates our blood and keeps us alive. In The Sublime Engine, Stephen Amidon and Thomas Amidon draw upon history, science, religion, popular culture, and literature to illuminate this endlessly intriguing component of our selves.
Much like the heart itself, this book is divided into several parts. The authors trace the heart’s sway over the human imagination from the time of the Egyptians and ancient Greece, through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, up to the modern era. Along the way, we learn, for example, that the heart beats 2.5 billion times during an average lifespan, pumping about 74 gallons of blood per hour. Although the heart weighs only around 15 ounces, the amount of energy it generates in a single day could drive a car 20 miles.
William Harvey is spotlighted as the genius who discovered that blood travels in a continuous circuit through the human body, and the story of his revelation is told in full. But his is just one of many stories in these pages, from Hippocrates to Christiaan Barnard’s first heart transplant operation. We also read of Werner Forssmann, the German internist who inserted a catheter into his heart to learn more about it, and René Laënnex, the Parisian physician who invented the stethoscope. Here as well is Minnesota physician C. Walton Lillehei, who stitched the circulatory systems of his young patients to those of their parents, effectively using the latter as heart-lung machines during surgeries, in a bold attempt to save the lives of doomed children.
A biography of an important symbol of our humanity, The Sublime Engine makes the heart leap off the page.
Hardcover : 224 pages
Publisher: Rodale Press, Inc. ( January 18, 2011 )
Item #: 13-181227
ISBN: 9781605295848
Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.375 inches
Product Weight: 14.0 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
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