Matters of the Heart

The seat of the soul, the sign of love, and the symbol of life – for millennia, there has been a certain mythology associated with the heart. Although advances in scientific research gradually debunked the myths surrounding the organ, it remained a mystery to the medical profession for a long time. Indeed, it was almost impossible to examine the heart of a living person until the early 20th century.

A key turning point came with the discovery of X-rays. For the first time, it was possible to visualize the heart inside the bodies of living people – although an X-ray examination required considerable patience around the turn of the 20th century. In those days, the process of capturing the image took several minutes, during which the patient was required to stay perfectly still. As the heart would beat hundreds of times over an exposure time of this length, it appeared as nothing more than a blurry shadow in the resulting X-ray image.