Introducing this book of essays, which accompanies (and fleshes out, so to speak) a summer exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, Sir Magdi Yacoub points out that “each heart exhibits individual features and behaviour”. The heart is liable to “capricious behaviour” (as Ethel Merman sang, “you’re not sick, you’re just in love”; or vice versa), which will not surprise poets, songwriters and romantics. It certainly adds an edge to the work of heart surgeons, coronary researchers and transplant patients who here discuss the heart’s secrets in terms of medicine, science, art, religion and culture.
THE HEART edited by James Peto
Yale, £16.99