![]() ![]() ![]() And, in some metaphysical sense, the woman from whom he had contracted the disease was still there with him on the dissection table, after all those years. This was a man, instantly humanized, who had walked and worked among us and died of love. This was now no longer a mere anatomy textbook, yielding up its slow secrets. This revelation completely transformed our daily encounters with our cadaver. Such a weak, bulging aorta, an aneurysm, could have come only from syphilis, which he had contracted years-or, more likely, decades-before. His aorta was ballooned out, swollen to three times its normal size. But the most striking abnormality within the cave of his chest was the enlargement of his aorta, the artery that distributes blood over the body. His heart, like his other muscles, was heavy with the weight of life. ![]() As freshman medical students, we had no idea why such a perfect body might have died-until we opened the chest. His body was like a textbook, perfect, flawless. He was muscular, in life a laborer, I imagined. The body on which we worked was that of a man, perhaps fifty years old. My first palpable encounter with the literal heart, early in medical school, in gross anatomy lab, showed me just how resistant such infections can be. And physicians have long known that love can infect the literal heart, too. Lovers have always known that love can go bad and infect the metaphorical heart. ![]()
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