歷史學X醫療史新時代

版主：昨日到近史所新書區看到的，網上瀏覽了一下，這本書號稱The first history of the contest between medical and cultural understandings of the heart.應具有一定的創新性，貼給大家參考。

Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine, and Emotion

作者：Alberti, Fay Bound (Senior Research Fellow, History Department, Queen Mary University of London)

出版社：Oxford Univ Pr

出版日期：2010年02月28日

內容簡介:

The heart is the most symbolic organ of the human body. Across cultures it is seen as the site of emotions, as well as the origin of life. We feel emotions in the heart, from the heart-stopping sensation of romantic love to the crushing sensation of despair.

And yet since the nineteenth century the heart has been redefined in medical terms as a pump, an organ responsible for the circulation of the blood. Emotions have been removed from the heart as an active site of influence and towards the brain. It is the brain that is the organ most commonly associated with emotion in the modern West.

So why, then, do the emotional meanings of the heart linger? Why do many transplantation patients believe that the heart, for instance, can transmit memories and emotions and why do we still refer to emotions as "heartfelt?"

We cannot answer these questions without reference to the history of the heart as both physical organ and emotional symbol. Matters of the Heart traces the ways emotions have been understood between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries as both physical entities and spiritual experiences. With reference to historical interpretations of such key concepts as gender, emotion, subjectivity and the self, it also addresses the shifting relationship from heart to brain as competing centers of emotion in the West.

http://www.books.com.tw/exep/prod/booksfile.php?item=F011860936