This morning I was discussing the latest matches of tennis in Monte-Carlo Open with my friend who is an avid tennis fan and a retired Judge. He emailed that if a player he did not enjoy watching in this tournament loses, that outcome would warm the cockles of his heart.
I teasingly replied that from my knowledge of the heart there were no such structures as cockles.
“I got you this time” he wrote back. “The cockles are the ventricles, named by some 12th century medical explorer (probably Leonardo) in Latin as "cochleae cordis" from "cochlea" which refers to snail and which, according to that person, the ventricles resemble. And the idiom means to cause warm feelings in your ventricles/heart.”
And that made me think about the vena amoris.
It is believed that dating back to ancient Egypt, the Sun and Moon gods were worshiped and rings depicting them were worn to keep homes safe. The Latin name vena amoris comes from early Rome where it was believed that vein ran from the fourth finger of the left hand directly to the heart. The belief in this non-existent vein is shrouded in mythology and romanticism since human cadaveric dissection, or at least good knowledge of human anatomy goes back to Ancient Egypt at least around 1300 BC. This was established by the finding of an Ancient Egyptian medical text bought by Edwin Smith in 1862 and now known as the Edwin Smith Papyrus. So, after thousands years of anatomical knowledge, Romans would have known if that vein existed or not.
Still, the romantic and mythological attraction to such a love vein made it to the Western cultures and is one of the reasons the engagement or wedding bands are placed on the fourth or “ring finger”. It is to note however that such a tradition is not universal, even in Western cultures where the wedding ring can be found on the middle finger or even on the thumb of the left hand, perhaps still in belief of that mythical vein going from the left hand to the heart.
… In college I enjoyed the zoology course as there was a practicum lab where we dissected animals to add to our academic learning. Our teacher was a renaissance man, multilingual and well versed in literary works in all the languages he spoke. During one lecture he said:
“You now learn about veins, muscles and nerves and you will be experts as biologists and medical doctors to address issues with these structures though your professional lives. That will give you the false comfort and confidence that what you see, no matter how complex, is what exists to make all in the animalia kingdom exist.
But the anatomy of your wisdom will excel only in realising that there are non-structures that often define the members of that kingdom. Today, I would like you to look for a very delicate nerve, the nervus benignitas – it goes from the nervus cardiacus cervicalis superior to the medulla oblongata of the brain. The first one who finds it will get an extra point on his grade.”
We had never learned about that nerve from our books but we went on searching. It took many of us decades to find it. It was the nerve of kindness which went from the heart to the brain. And perhaps made Homo sapiens unique in the animalia kingdom.
… So today, a discussion about tennis took me from snail-shaped ventricles to the “nerve of kindness”.
And to renewing my gratitude to a teacher who almost 40 years ago made us look and cherish that non-structural connection between the heart and the brain, and made us better people by doing so.
April 16, 2022
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2022
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