Scan Matters Of The Heart Curated By Fay Bound Alberti Readable In Audio Books

Bound Alberti's book is a fascinating journey into the cultural history of the heart and its relation to emotions, From the time of Descartes's sharp separation between mind and body and his reduction of the body to a machine, the traditional view of the heart as the seat of emotion was subject to challenge.
However, this was a live debate up until the early twentieth century, when contemporary science pushed the brain into the place of the heart so that the brain became the seat of emotions.
Yet throughout the socalled process of mechanizing the heart, nineteenth century physicians still tended to accept the view of the centrality of the heart to emotional experience.


Although I cringe when I see the term "gendered," recalling the identity politics of postmodern cultural criticism, Alberti's historical account of functional vs.
structural heart disease and which patients tended to be diagnosed with which in nineteenth century medcine, It is true that women tended to be diagnosed with functional heart disease and men with structural heart disease, She also notes the interesting fact that among the Victorian literati, having heart disease was a kind of status symbol, indicating greater sensitivity of emotions.


The nineteenth century view of the heart suggested a more holistic approach to the body and emotion than

was later characteristic of the braincentered view.
The march of medical reductionism, in which the whole was understood in terms of its constituent parts, led to increasing specialization in medicine, including a sharp separation between neurology and cardiology, and a devolution of the heart to a mere pump.


Today, at least in some circles, this situation is changing, Stories of organ recipients allegedly taking on the personality of their donors abound, The Institute of HeartMath accepts the view that the heart in itself is the chief causal factor in many emotions, The Canadian physiologist Andrew Armour whom I met at a conference at the Vatican inhas done considerable work on the "minibrain" and nervous system in the heart.
Yet reductionism remains strong, and we will have to wait and see whether holism will make major inroads into the current paradigm of medical practice.


If you want an excellent, scholarly book that brings the history of attitudes toward the heart from Descartes' time until today in to focus, then this is the book for you.
The heart is the most symbolic organ of the human body, Across cultures it is seen as the site of emotions, as well as the origin of life, We feel emotions in the heart, from the heartstopping sensation of romantic love to the crushing sensation of despair, And yet since the nineteenth century the heart has been redefined in medical terms as a pump, an organ responsible for the circulation of the blood.
Emotions have been removed from the heart as an active site of influence and towards the brain, It is the brain that is the organ most commonly associated with emotion in the modern West, So why, then, do the emotional meanings of the heart linger Why do many transplantation patients believe that the heart, for instance, can transmit memories and emotions and why do we still refer to emotions as 'heartfelt' We cannot answer these questions without reference to the history of the heart as both physical organ and emotional symbol.
Matters of the Heart traces the ways emotions have been understood between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries as both physical entities and spiritual experiences.
With reference to historical interpretations of such key concepts as gender, emotion, subjectivity and the self, it also addresses the shifting relationship from heart to brain as competing centres of emotion in the West.
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