THE HUMAN HEART.

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1426, 13 November 1923, Page 2

THE HUMAN HEART.

AN ENERGETIC ORGAN. • What an amazing organ the heart is is shown by Professor C. N. Holmes in the Scientific American. He points out that within each human breast 'lis energetic organ is beating, on an average, about 75 times per minute, or 4500 times per hour. Accordingly, the heart beats, approximately. 108,000 times daily, 39,000,000 times yearly, and during a lifetime of threescore and ten years, two billion seven hundred million times. If we estimate the population of our w,orld at 1,700,000.000 people, then all the human hearts on our terrestial planet are beating at the rate of approximately 127,&00',000,000 times, per minute, or 66 quadrillion times per year. That is to say these 1,270,000,000 human hearts are throbbing at a rate of about two billion times per second. Our heart-engine contains four compartments, two auricles, and two ventricles. The auricles are reservoirs, which supply the pumping ventricles with blood. Therefore, the dynamic energy of the human heart resides in the right and the left ventricles. When these ventricles contract, the right ventricle sends ■ its supply of impure blood to be purified by the oxygen in the lungs, and the left ventricle forces its supply of purified blood to circulate in the body. When the "heart beats"—that is, when the right and left ventricles beat, an average of about 10 cubic Inches of blood is expelled from the heart-engine. Accordingly, in a minute, after 75 heart beats, the energetic heart has pumped 750 cubic inches of blood. That means the heart pumps 45,000 cubic inches of blood per hour, 1,000,000 cubic inches of blood per day, and 392,000,000 cubic inches, .or more than 225,000 cubic feet of blood per year. Were the heart a water pujmp instead 1 of a blood pump, fit would expell, inasmuch as a cubic foot of water weighs about 62J1b., approximately 700 tons of water during the course of one year. And this amount of work is accomplished by only a part of a small muscular organ about as big as the average fist I It has been estimated that the left ventricle alone exercises sufficient pressure per square inch to support a column of blood 9ft in height, and that it performs daily an amount of work equal to 90 foot tons. Were we able to collect in a cubical reservoir all the blood pumped by one heart-engine in one year, that reservoir would be about 61ft in each of'its three dimensions.