Anatomy and Art

They say that home is where the heart is, and I’ve finally completed the first painting here at the new house.  I guess this must be home.  This was a fun one to make.  I usually only do figures and faces in this kind of style, but I’ve been meaning to play with a little of what I learned about the body’s internals on canvas for a while now.  It was a good refresher too.  I so rarely look at organs anymore.  Most of the biology I see these days is at the molecular level.  So this was fun.

This week, our gross anatomy class has been spending a little time checking out the thorax.  So far we’ve mostly remained above the diaphragm so it’s mostly heart and lungs in there.

There is something very cool about holding a human heart in your hands.  It really is an impressive piece of organic machinery.  I cut through the left ventricle to open it up, and couldn’t believe how thick the walls were.  The walls of the left side of the heart are always thicker than the right.  That’s because it has to pump blood out to the whole body through the aorta, whereas the right side only has to pump as far as the lungs.  And the muscles inside look right out of an alien landscape.

Everything in there is also so compact, the way that the heart and the lungs and all the vessels between fit together.  When you first remove the lungs, they have indentations for the heart all the superior heart vessels.  And the heart largely takes it’s shape from having been wrapped in the lungs and sat on the diaphragm for all that time.  The esophagus, trachea, and thoracic aorta are all centered in the space offered between the lungs.  The sympathetic chain hides out between the inner and innermost intercostal muscles and manages to cover so much space without ever getting in the way of anything else.

All in all, it’s a cool little area to see.

This was sent to me a long time ago. If you’re looking for a refresher in basic heart facts, or a refresher in Spanish, this is just the best there is…

Hard ‘N Phirm’s “El Corazón”