“This book does away with the idea of the heart as a machine—the heart is not a pump! In many animals, blood moves without blood vessels and heart. The scientific facts, properly thought through, show today that the human heart beats as an organ of perception for the whole of one’s life.” — Dr. Armin J. Husemann

To recast modern science as a science of the human being, to change the paradigm with which we perceive and understand life in all its attributes, including the physical human body, is and will be a mighty task for some time to come. Perhaps the most obvious, and also weakest pillar of the view of the human being as a kind of machine, is the metaphoric assumption, seemingly beyond questioning, that the human heart functions as a pump. In this book, Dr. Armin Husemann approaches the activity of the human heart and the blood that moves from a perspective grounded in the spirit and practice of natural science, but unbiased by either received truths or conventional dogma.

What does it look like to approach the phenomena of beating heart and flowing blood from a wholistic perspective? What does it mean that, in the human embryo, what is to become the circulatory system functions prior to the formation of the heart? Does the human heart really have something to do with our emotions? With love? Understanding? A kind of knowing qualitatively different from, yet re-lated to, what we might call “brain-knowing”?

This book builds a much-needed bridge between natural science and a universally human spiritual science, while also providing a comprehensive, accessible view of the human heart and how blood moves in the human body.

Dr. Armin J. Husemann, MD, born in 1950, worked as a school doctor from 1988 to 1993. He has been a general practitioner in private practice since 1987 in Stuttgart, Germany. Since 1993, he has been the director and a lecturer at the Eugen Kolisko Academy (formerly The Anthroposophic Medical Seminar) in Filderstadt. Dr. Husemann's books translated into English include The Harmony of the Human Body: Musical Principles in Human Physiology (Floris Books, 2003); Human Hearing and the Reality of Music (SteinerBooks, 2015); and Form, Life & Consciousness: An Introduction to Anthroposophic Medicine and Study of the Human Being (SteinerBooks, 2019).

28 November 2022; Translated by Catherine E. Creeger; SB; 152 pages; 254mm x 203mm; hb;