Johanna Shapiro PhD
This inaugural section presents two very different articles that nevertheless are intimately linked through the thread of medical humanities1.
The essay by Larry Zaroff is a first-person, no-holds-barred reflection on aspects of his career as a cardiac surgeon. In it, he admits to embodying the purely mechanistic approach favored by many of his fellow surgeons. The heart is a pump, he asserts, and in his surgeon’s mind, that seems to be the long and the short of it. Dr. Zaroff is baffled, and somewhat annoyed, when a patient whom he expects to be grateful to him for saving his life, complains of impotence. Go see a urologist, the surgeon curtly advises. It is only in retrospect that the pump metaphor seems rather limited, as he contemplates the extraordinary symbolism that saturates turns of phrase involving the heart.