She has a tidy ranch home where the front doorbell chimes "Bless This House" and 17 packed photo albums line a shelf in the den. She shoves at the window.
She has friends and neighbors who count on her to bake 175 dozen cookies every Christmas. She shoves at the window.
In the darkness, Karen feels something brush across her face. It is a life vest. She clutches it and feels a surge of hope. She pushes on the window until she feels it give way. The window doesn't open. It falls out and floats away.
Dr. Ilan Wittstein is a student of the heart. The son of a rabbi, he studied Sufi mysticism and jazz guitar in college along with molecular biology. Now he's a respected cardiologist at one of the world's leading centers of medical science, Johns Hopkins University.
Perusing bookstores off-hours, he's as likely to reach for a tome exploring the brain-wave patterns of meditating monks as he is a more conventional science text, he says. He doesn't think it's a waste of time when he reads that a Harvard neurologist has studied the phenomenon of voodoo deaths -- seemingly healthy people who drop dead after learning they've supposedly been hexed. He thinks that's very interesting.
Wittstein is as fascinated by the power of the mind as by the beating of the heart. He wants to know how what people think affects them physiologically.
In the prosaic language of a modern science textbook, the heart is a pump: a contracting muscle that pumps blood to the lungs to pick up oxygen, then keeps on pumping to deliver that oxygen-rich blood to the rest of the body.
Yet poets and philosophers since antiquity have debated the heart's role as the seat of the soul and the font of passionate emotions, from anger and pride to courage, valor and grief. In "The Iliad," the Greek poet Homer described hearts black with rage, dripping with a righteous vengeance as sweet as honey or cramping in anguish. More than 2,000 years later, William Shakespeare often evoked hearts so overcome with emotion that they shatter. In "Macbeth," he wrote: "Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak / Whispers the o'er-fraught heart, and bids it break."
Wittstein is interested in both the prosaic and poetic concepts of the heart. He wants to know how to measure and quantify where the two hearts meet.
The cardiologist was 35 years old in 1998, and had only recently joined the teaching staff at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine as an assistant professor, he says, when a brief entry in the journal Circulation caught his attention. It was titled "A Broken Heart."
The article, just a few paragraphs, summarized the case of a woman whose reaction to her husband's sudden death seemed like something out of a love sonnet, not a medical journal: The beating of her heart became dangerously weak. The woman's doctor was pretty confident his patient hadn't had a heart attack, because her heart soon began contracting normally. But he couldn't say for sure what she had suffered other than the obvious: grief.
The case appealed to Wittstein's curiosity at the mysteries of science.
