Psychogenesis and heart disease now: The thinking heart in action

Abstract

The termPsychocardiology has achieved prominence quite recently to describe both a field of research and an approach to clinical practice, though the evidence upon which this is based is not at all new. Systematic research linking the heart and the mind has a far longer history - its origins inmedical science can be foundmore than a century ago in, for example, the work of the psychoanalytic movement. And from a more cardiologic space, the speculations of the eminent physician Sir William Osler clearly foreshadowed moves to link personality with diseases of the heart when he said of the person at risk of angina, that . . . It is not the delicate neurotic person who is prone to angina, but the robust, the vigorous in mind and body, the keen and ambitious man, the indicator of whose engines is always at full speed ahead. This chapter traces the origins of thought linking the heart and mind, commencing with the place of the heart in literature and religion, and ending with a hypothesis that subjective perceptions of cardiovascular activation arising from sympathetic arousal account for the compelling belief among person-kind that diseases of the heart are inextricably linked to afflictions of the mind.