Seven things we used to know about the heart
You can’t survive without it, the noise it makes puts a newborn baby happily to sleep and if you drop it down the loo they’ll charge you to replace it. No hang on, that’s a phone. But most of that also applies to that wonderful organ, famed in song and story, the heart. Here’s what Jake Yapp found out about it.
1. Your blood travels 12,000 miles every day. It has therefore won every badge going on MyFitnessPal.
2. Aristotle thought the heart was a hot, dry organ, which is actually true when you’re deeply hungover.
3. In 1628, English physicist William Harvey realised that the heart’s role was the transmission of the blood. Later scientists learned its other purpose – to break at the bit in Bambi where the mother dies.
4. Harvey was the same physicist who restarted a pigeon’s heart by flicking it. The 麻豆官网首页入口 is not responsible for any pigeon-flicking that may ensue as a result of this finding.
5. 1963 saw the first patent being filed for an artificial heart. In 1978 Debbie Harry suggested you could make one out of glass, which is why she’s a singer and not a cardiac surgeon.
6. Greek physician Galen thought the heart was the hearthstone of the body, which makes the shoulder blades the mantelpiece and the chin the carriage clock. Yes? Yes.
7. A single heart cell has a pulse, another heart cell has a different pulse. If you push them together so they are touching, they synchronise. If you pushed loads of them together they’d play the theme from Casualty.
So there we are: the heart. Please note that Radio 4 accepts no responsibility for you singing Heart of Glass for the rest of the day.
