Until the early 17th century, scientists believed that the heart operated a bit like a lamp, warming blood that had been produced by the liver. In 1616, when the English physician William Harvey corrected this misconception and explained how the heart works, the audience at the Royal College of Physicians booed him. Why did it take so long for scientists to understand the heart’s real function? One possibility is that until the invention of mechanical pumps in the late 16th century, doctors lacked the metaphorical language to describe what the heart does.
“The truth of the body is as much about storytelling as it is about anatomy,” the writer and surgeon Gabriel Weston argues in Alive, an unusual and gripping book that she describes as an “ecumenical exploration” of her subject. An English graduate, in her early 20s Weston enrolled in a pioneering medical degree programme designed to encourage arts students to become doctors. She believes clinical medicine has much to learn from the humanities. When anatomy textbooks show organs and body parts in isolation, removed from the individual and their wider context, Weston believes they miss important truths. Bodies are, after all, not purely mechanical entities. And so Alive, a book that draws on science, history, philosophy and art, is as much about what our bodies mean to us, how they feel to us, as what they do.
