“Here be dragons.”^23 It might be the only globe (or map) that actually
contains that expression, but has now become a popular saying for “no
trespassing.” The last major frontier of the human body was finally
challenged, and mastered in the 1960s, and it was no accident that movies
and television shows started portraying surgeons as heroes—unthinkable
representations a century before. Here be dragons no longer applies in the
human body.
We simply cannot fathom the extreme passivity of care given to the
Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson and President Dwight Eisenhower
in 1955. Both men suffered heart attacks in the space of a couple months,
and other than diagnostic EKGs, there was nothing to speed their recovery.
In an era before angiography, cardiac stents, and coronary artery bypass
surgery, it seems ridiculous that the President of the United States was
given a pair of slippers and ferried about in a wheelchair, praying that his
heart attack would respond to a program of six weeks’ rest.^24 Today, every
American undoubtedly expects a full cardiac resuscitation, with
angiographic stenting or open-heart surgery following a heart attack.
Cardiac valve repair or replacement, and aneurysm repair represent
sobering surgical challenges, but it would not require undaunted courage
to undergo such operations.
It is ironic that the heart was the last organ that yielded itself to the
surgeon’s scalpel, even though it was the first organ to be quantified
through physiology by William Harvey. Denton Cooley, the famous
Houston heart surgeon, said, “It’s about the only organ in the body that you
can really witness its function.”^25 I had seen the heart of a dead horse in
the necropsy room at my father’s veterinary hospital when I was an
adolescent, and it was confusing, lifeless, and smelly. But when I
witnessed my first open-heart operation in college, I was dumbstruck,
because there before me was a strikingly pulsating, wriggling, colorful,
organ; replenishing and nourishing the entire frame of a human body.
No diagram or painting can possibly capture the dynamic function of
the heart, and it was only when the hearthstone of the body was governed
that surgeons could claim full ascendancy from a previously shameful
trade to respectful—even glorious—profession. Think I’m too
melodramatic? Position yourself in a hospital waiting room, and wait for a
heart surgeon to meet with a small congregation of frightened family
members, whose mother suffered a heart attack the day before, and