Historically Speaking: Broken Hearts and How to Heal Them

Modern medicine confirms what people have known for thousands of years: heartbreak is more than a metaphor.

The Wall Street Journal

September 30, 2023

A mere generation ago, “heartbreak” was an overused literary metaphor but not an actual medical event. The first person to recognize it as a genuine condition was a Japanese cardiologist named Hikaru Sato. In 1990, Dr. Sato identified the curious case of a female patient who displayed the symptoms of a heart attack while testing negative for it. He named it “Takotsubo Syndrome” after noticing that the left ventricle of her heart changed shape during the episode to resemble a takotsubo, a traditional octopus-trap. A Japanese study in 2001 not only confirmed Sato’s identification of a sudden cardio event that mimics a heart attack but also highlighted the common factor of emotional distress in such patients. It had taken the medical profession 4,000 years to acknowledge what poets had been saying all along: Broken Heart Syndrome is real.

The heart has always been regarded as more than just a pump. The Sumerians of ancient Mesopotamia, now part of modern Iraq, understood it performed a physical function. But they also believed it was the source of all emotion, including love, happiness and despair. One of the first known references to “heartbreak” appears in a 17th century B.C. clay tablet containing a copy of “Atrahasis,” a Babylonian epic poem that parallels the Old Testament story of Noah’s Ark. The words “heart” and “break” are used to describe Atrahasis’s pain at being unable to save people from their imminent doom.

The heart also played a dual mind-body role in ancient Chinese medicine. There was a great emphasis on the importance of emotional regulation, since an enraged or greedy heart was believed to affect other organs. The philosopher Confucius used the heart as an analogy for the perfect relationship between the king and his people: Harmony in the latter and obedience from the former were both essential.

Heart surgeon Daniel Hale Williams. ILLUSTRATION BY THOMAS FUCHS

In the West, the early Catholic Church adopted a more top-down approach to the heart and its emotional problems. Submitting to Christ was the only treatment for what St. Augustine described as the discomfort of the unquiet heart. Even then, the avoidance of heart “pain” was not always possible. For the 16th-century Spanish saint Teresa of Avila, the agonizing sensation of being pierced in the heart was the necessary proof she had received God’s love.

By Shakespeare’s era, the idea of dying for love had become a cliché, but the deadly effects of heartbreak were accepted without question. Grief and anguish kill several of Shakespeare’s characters, including Lady Montague in “Romeo and Juliet,” King Lear, and Desdemona’s father in “Othello.” Shame drives Enobarbus to will his heart to stop in “Antony and Cleopatra”: “Throw my heart against the flint and hardness of my fault.”

London parish clerks continued to list grief as a cause of death until the 19th century, by which time advances in medical science had produced more mechanical explanations for life’s mysteries. In 1893, Daniel Hale Williams—founder of Provident Hospital in Chicago, the first Black-owned hospital in the U. S.—performed one of the earliest successful heart surgeries. He quite literally fixed the broken heart of a stabbing victim by sewing the pericardium or heart sac back together.

Nowadays, there are protocols for treating the coronary problem diagnosed by Dr. Sato. But although we can cure Broken Heart Syndrome, we still can’t cure a broken heart.

Historically Speaking: The Enduring Technology of the Book

Durable, stackable and skimmable, books have been the world’s favorite way to read for two millennia and counting.

The Wall Street Journal

August 3, 2023

A fragment of the world’s oldest book was discovered earlier this year. Dated to about 260 B.C., the 6-by-10-inch piece of papyrus survived thanks to ancient Egyptian embalmers who recycled it for cartonnage, a papier-mache-like material used in mummy caskets. The Graz Mummy Book, so-called because it resides in the library of Austria’s Graz University, is 400 years older than the previous record holder, a fragment of a Latin book from the 2nd century A.D.

Stitching on the papyrus shows that it was part of a book with pages rather than a scroll. Scrolls served well enough in the ancient world, when only priests and scribes used them, but as the literacy rate in the Roman Empire increased, so did the demand for a more convenient format. A durable, stackable, skimmable, stitched-leaf book made sense. Its resemblance to a block of wood inspired the Latin name caudex, “bark stem,” which evolved into codex, the word for an ancient manuscript. The 1st-century Roman poet and satirist Martial was an early adopter: A codex contained more pages than the average scroll, he told his readers, and could even be held in one hand!

Thomas Fuchs

The book developed in different forms around the world. In India and parts of southeast Asia, dried palm-leaves were sewn together like venetian blinds. The Chinese employed a similar technique using bamboo or silk until the third century A.D., when hemp paper became a reliable alternative. In South America, the Mayans made their books from fig-tree bark, which was pliable enough to be folded into leaves. Only four codices escaped the mass destruction of Mayan culture by Franciscan missionaries in the 16th century.

Gutenberg’s printing press, perfected in 1454, made that kind of annihilation impossible in Europe. By the 16th century, more than nine million books had been printed. Authorities still tried their best to exert control, however. In 1538, England’s King Henry VIII prohibited the selling of “naughty printed books” by unlicensed booksellers.

Licensed or not, the profit margins for publishers were irresistible, especially after Jean Grolier, a 16th-century Treasurer-General of France, started the fashion for expensively decorated book covers made of leather. Bookselling became a cutthroat business. Shakespeare was an early victim of book-piracy: Shorthand stenographers would hide among the audience and surreptitiously record his plays so they could be printed and sold.

Beautiful leather-bound books never went out of fashion, but by the end of the 18th century, there was a new emphasis on cutting costs and shortening production time. Germany experimented with paperbacks in the 1840s, but these were downmarket prototypes that failed to catch on.

The paperback revolution was started in 1935 by the English publisher Allen Lane, who one day found himself stuck at a train station with nothing to read. Books were too rarefied and expensive, he decided. Facing down skeptics, Lane created Penguin and proceeded to publish 10 literary novels as paperbacks, including Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms.” A Penguin book had a distinctive look that signaled quality, yet it cost the same as a packet of cigarettes. The company sold a million paperbacks in its first year.

Radio was predicted to mean the downfall of books; so were television, the Internet and ebooks. For the record, Americans bought over 788.7 million physical books last year. Not bad for an invention well into its third millennium.

Historically Speaking: The Noble Elf Has a Devilish Alter-Ego

Pointy-eared magical creatures abound in folklore, but they weren’t always cute

The Wall Street Journal

September 8, 2022

“The Rings of Power” series, Amazon’s prequel to J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy epic, “The Lord of the Rings,” reserves a central role for heroic elves. Members of this tall, immortal race are distinguished by their beauty and wisdom and bear little resemblance to the merry, diminutive helpers in Santa’s workshop.

Yet both are called elves. One reason for the confusion is that the idea of pointy-eared magical beings has never been culturally specific. The ancient Greeks didn’t have elves per se, but their myths did include sex-mad satyrs, Dionysian half-human-half-animal nature spirits whose ears were pointed like a horse’s.

Before their conversion to Christianity, the Anglo-Saxons, like their Norse ancestors, believed in magical beings such as water spirits, elves and dragons. Later, in the epic poem Beowulf, written down around 1000, the “ylfe” is among the monsters spawned by the biblical Cain.

Benjamin Walker as Gil-galad, High King of the Elves of the West, in “The Rings of Power”
PHOTO: AMAZON STUDIOS

The best accounts of the early Norse myths come from two medieval Icelandic collections known as the Eddas, which are overlaid with Christian cosmology. The Prose Edda divided elves into the “light elves,” who are fair and wondrous, and the “dark elves,” who live underground and are interchangeable with dwarves. Both kinds appeared in medieval tales to torment or, occasionally, help humans.

When not portrayed as the cause of unexplained illnesses, elves were avatars for sexual desire. In Chaucer’s comic tale, the lusty “Wife of Bath” describes the elf queen as sex personified and then complains that the friars have chased all the fair folk away.

The popular conception of elves continued to evolve during the Renaissance under the influence of French “faerie” folklore, Celtic myths and newly available translations of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” and Virgil’s “Georgics.” Shakespeare took something from almost every tradition in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” from Puck the naughty little sprite to Queen Titania, seductress of hapless humans.

But while elves were becoming smaller and cuter in English literature, in Northern Europe they retained their malevolence. Inspired by the Germanic folk tale of the Elf King who preys on little children, in 1782 Goethe composed “Der Erlkonig,” about a boy’s terror as he is chased through the forest to his death. Schubert liked the ballad so much that he set it to music.

In the 19th century, the Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, along with Hans Christian Andersen, brought ancient fairy tales and folk whimsy to a world eager for relief from rampant industrialization. The Grimms put a cheerful face on capitalism with the story of a cobbler and the industrious elves who work to make him wealthy. Clement Clarke Moore made elves the consumer’s friend in his night-before-Christmas poem, “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” where a “jolly old elf” stuffs every stocking with toys.

On the more serious side, the first English translation of Beowulf appeared in 1837, marking the beginning of the Victorians’ obsession with the supernatural and all things gothic. The poem’s negative connotation surrounding elves burst into the open with Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, based on Germanic legends, which portrayed the Elf King Alberich as an evil dwarf.

The elfin future would likely have been silly or satanic were it not for Tolkien’s restoration of the “light elf” tradition. For now, at least, the lovely royal elf Galadriel rules.

Historically Speaking: Typos Have Been Around as Long as Writing Itself

Egyptian engravers, medieval scribes and even Shakespeare’s printer made little mistakes that have endured

The Wall Street Journal

May 12, 2022

The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., is 100 years old this month. The beloved national monument is no less perfect for having one slight flaw: The word “future” in the Second Inaugural Address was mistakenly carved as “Euture.” It is believed that the artist, Ernest C. Bairstow, accidentally picked up the “e” stencil instead of the “f.” He tried to fix it by filling in the bottom line, but the smudged outline is still visible.

Bairstow was by no means the first engraver to rely on the power of fillers. It wasn’t uncommon for ancient Egyptian carvers—most of whom were illiterate—to botch their inscriptions. The seated Pharaoh statue at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia depicts Rameses II, third Pharaoh of the 19th dynasty, who lived during the 13th century BC. Part of the inscription ended up being carved backward, which the artist tried to hide with a bit of filler and paint. But time and wear have made the mistake, well, unmistakable.

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

Medieval scribes were notorious for botching their illuminated manuscripts, using all kinds of paint tricks to hide their errors. But for big mistakes—for example, when an entire line was dropped—the monks could get quite inventive. In a 13th-century Book of Hours at the Walters Museum in Baltimore, an English monk solved the problem of a missing sentence by writing it at the bottom of the page and drawing a ladder with man on it, pulling the sentence by a rope, to where it was meant to be.

The phrase “the devil is in the details” may have been inspired by Titivillus, the medieval demon of typos. Monks were warned that Titivillus ensured that every scribal mistake was collected and logged, so that it could be held against the offender at Judgment Day.

The warning seems to have had only limited effect. The English poet Geoffrey Chaucer was so enraged by his copyist Adam Pinkhurst that he attacked him in verse, complaining he had “to rub and scrape: and all is through thy negligence and rape.”

The move to print failed to solve the problem of typos. When Shakespeare’s Cymbeline was first committed to text, the name of the heroine was accidentally changed from Innogen to Imogen, which is how she is known today. Little typos could have big consequences, such as the so-called Wicked Bible of 1631, whose printers managed to leave out the “not” in the seventh commandment, thereby telling Christians that “thou shalt commit adultery.”

The rise of the newspaper deadline in the 19th century inevitably led to typos big and small, as well as those unfortunate and unlikely. In 1838, British readers of the Manchester Guardian were informed that “writers” rather than “rioters” had caused extensive property damage during a protest meeting in Yorkshire.

In the age of computers, a single typo can have catastrophic consequences. On July 22, 1962, NASA’s Mariner 1 probe to Venus exploded just 293 seconds after launching. The failure was traced to an inputting error. A single hyphen was inadvertently left off one of the codes.

Historically Speaking: How Roses Came to Mean True Love

Our favorite Valentine’s Day flower was already a symbol of passion in ancient Greek mythology

The Wall Street Journal

February 13, 2021

“My luve is like a red red rose,/That’s newly sprung in June,” wrote the Scottish poet Robert Burns in 1794, creating an inexhaustible revenue stream for florists everywhere, especially around Valentine’s Day. But why a red rose, you might well ask.

According to Greek myth, the blood of Aphrodite turned roses red.
PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

Longevity is one reason. The rose is an ancient and well-traveled flower: A 55 million-year-old rose fossil found in Colorado suggests that roses were already blooming when our earliest primate ancestors began populating the earth. If you want to see where it all began, at least in the New World, then a trip to the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, roughly two hours’ drive from Denver, should be on your list of things to do once the pandemic is over.

In Greek mythology the rose was associated with Aphrodite, goddess of love, who was said to have emerged from the sea in a shower of foam that transformed into white roses. Her son Cupid bribed Harpocrates, the god of silence, with a single rose in return for not revealing his mother’s love affairs, giving rise to the Latin phrase sub rosa, “under the rose,” as a term for secrecy. As for the red rose, it was said to be born of tragedy: Aphrodite became tangled in a rose bush when she ran to comfort her lover Adonis as he lay dying from a wild boar attack. Scratched and torn by its thorns, her feet bled onto the roses and turned them crimson.

For the ancient Romans, the rose’s symbolic connection to love and death made it useful for celebrations and funerals alike. A Roman banquet without a suffocating cascade of petals was no banquet at all, and roses were regularly woven into garlands or crushed for their perfume. The first time Mark Antony saw Cleopatra he had to wade through a carpet of rose petals to reach her, by which point he had completely lost his head.

Rose cultivation in Asia became increasingly sophisticated during the Middle Ages, but in Europe the early church looked askance at the flower, regarding it as yet another example of pagan decadence. Fortunately, the Frankish emperor Charlemagne, an avid horticulturalist, refused to be cowed by old pieties, and in 794 he decreed that all royal gardens should contain roses and lilies.

The imperial seal of approval hastened the rose’s acceptance into the ecclesiastical fold. The Virgin Mary was likened to a thornless white rose because she was free of original sin. In fact, a climbing rose planted in her honor in 815 by the monks of Germany’s Hildesheim Cathedral is the oldest surviving rose bush today. Red roses, by contrast, symbolized the Crucifixion and Christian martyrs like St. Valentine, a priest killed by the Romans in the 3rd century, whose feast day is celebrated on Feb. 14. In the 14th century, his emergence as the patron saint of romantic love tipped the scales in favor of the red over the white rose.

The symbolism attached to the rose has long made it irresistible to poets. Shakespeare’s audience would have known that when Juliet compares Romeo to the flower—“that which we call a rose,/By any other name would smell as sweet”—it meant tragedy awaited the lovers. Yet they would have felt comforted, too, since each red rose bears witness, as Burns wrote, to the promise of love unbound and eternal: “Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,/And the rocks melt wi’ the sun.”

Historically Speaking: The Pleasures and Pains of Retirement

Since the Roman Empire, people have debated whether it’s a good idea to stop working in old age

The Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2019

The new film “All Is True,” directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh, imagines how William Shakespeare might have lived after he stopped writing plays. Alas for poor Shakespeare, in this version of his life retirement is hell. By day he potters in his garden, waging a feeble battle against Mother Nature; by night he is equally ineffectual against the verbal onslaughts of his resentful family.

In real life, people have been arguing the case for and against retirement since antiquity. The Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero was thoroughly against the idea. In his essay “Cato the Elder on Aging,” Cicero argued that the best antidote to old age was a purposeful life. “I am in my eighty-fourth year,” he wrote, “yet, as you see, old age has not quite unnerved or shattered me. The senate and the popular assembly never find my vigor wanting.” Cicero lived by the pen—he was the greatest speechwriter in history—but he died by the sword, murdered on the orders of Mark Antony for his support of the waning Roman Republic.

Knowing when to exit from public life is a difficult art. The Roman Emperor Diocletian (ca. 245-316) retired to his palace in Split, in modern Croatia, after ruling for 21 years. According to Edward Gibbon, Diocletian was so content for the last six of years of his life that when emissaries from Rome tried to persuade him to return, he replied that he couldn’t possibly leave his cabbages.

For most of history, of course, the average person had no choice but to carry on working until they died. But in the 18th century, longer lifespans created a dilemma: The old were outliving their usefulness. Not realizing that he had two more productive decades left, the 60-year-old Voltaire told his friend Madame du Deffand: “I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities…. It is the only pleasure I have left.”

By the end of the 19th century, it had become possible for at least some ordinary people to spend their last years in retirement. In 1883, the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck bowed to popular opinion and announced that all retirees over 65 would receive pensions. With that, 65 became the official age of retirement.

But some critics argued that this was the thin end of the wedge. If people could be forced out of careers and jobs on the basis of an arbitrary age limit, what else could be done to them? Troubled by what he regarded as ageism, the novelist Anthony Trollope published “The Fixed Period,” a dystopian novel about a society where anyone over the age is 67 is euthanized for his or her own good. The naysayers against any form of government retirement plan held sway in the U.S. until President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act in 1935, by which time half of America’s elderly were living in poverty.

Today, the era of leisurely retirements may be passing into history. Whether driven by financial need or personal preference, for many people retirement simply means changing their occupation. According to the AARP, the number of adults working past age 65 has doubled since 1985.

Even the rich and famous aren’t retiring: President George W. Bush is a painter; the Oscar-nominated actor Gene Hackman is a novelist; and Microsoft founder Bill Gates is saving the planet. In this day and age, flush from his success on Broadway, a retired Shakespeare might start his own podcast.

WSJ Historically Speaking: Kylo Ren, Meet Huck Finn: A History of Sequels and Their Heroes

The pedigree of sequels is as old as storytelling itself

ILLUSTRATION: RUTH GWILY

“Star Wars: The Last Jedi” may end up being the most successful movie sequel in the biggest sequel-driven franchise in the history of entertainment. That’s saying something, given Hollywood’s obsession with sequels, prequels, reboots and remakes. Although this year’s “Guardians of the Galaxy 2” was arguably better than the first, plenty of people—from critics to stand-up comedians—have wondered why in the world we needed a 29th “Godzilla,” an 11th “Pink Panther” or “The Godfather Part III.”

But sequels aren’t simply about chasing the money. They have a distinguished pedigree, as old as storytelling itself. Homer gets credit for popularizing the trend in the eighth century B.C., when he followed up “The Iliad” with “The Odyssey,” in which one of the relatively minor characters in the original story triumphs over sexy immortals, scary monsters and evil suitors of his faithful wife. Presumably with an eye to drawing in fans of the “Iliad,” Homer was sure to throw in a flashback about the Trojan horse. Continue reading…

WSJ Historically Speaking: In Praise of the Humble, Sometimes Bawdy Limerick

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

It’s National Poetry Month, so let us praise the humble limerick, in spite of (or perhaps because of) its bawdy, silly rhymes. After all, it’s the only literary form to encompass the poetic genius of both St. Thomas Aquinas and Krusty the Clown from “The Simpsons,” who starts but never finishes the ditty, “There once was a man named Enis…”

Most people know the limerick’s rigid meter and rhyme scheme—the first, second and fifth lines should rhyme with each other, as should the shorter third and fourth lines. But no one really knows where the limerick began or why it’s named for a small Irish city rather than for Peru or Tobago, home to many an Old Man and Young Lady featured in said poems. Continue reading…

WSJ Historically Speaking: The More-Bitter-Than-Sweet History of Sugar

‘If sack [wine] and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked,” says the rollicking Sir John Falstaff in Shakespeare’s “Henry IV, Part 1.” That was a more innocent time. Nowadays, books such as Gary Taubes’s “The Case Against Sugar” have linked it to many of the world’s health crises, including diabetes, obesity and high blood pressure. Continue reading…

WSJ Historically Speaking: The Tragic Side of Weddings

Weddings are happy affairs. What could possibly go wrong? From left, Christian Bale, Calista Flockhart, Dominic West, Anna Friel in 1999’s ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream.’ PHOTO: FOX SEARCHLIGHT/EVERETT COLLECTION

Weddings are happy affairs. What could possibly go wrong? From left, Christian Bale, Calista Flockhart, Dominic West, Anna Friel in 1999’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ PHOTO: FOX SEARCHLIGHT/EVERETT COLLECTION

If April is the cruelest month, then June is the happiest—at least for those hoping to say “I do.” Surveys show that in America, about 16% of all weddings occur in June, making it the most popular wedding month. In many parts of the country, flowers are at their peak and the weather is perfect. What could go wrong?

A great deal, it turns out. With so much riding on the day, weddings occupy a curious place in the human psyche, wedged somewhere between the heights of ecstasy and the depths of despair. The notorious “Red Wedding” episode a few years back in HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” in which the host Lord Frey massacres his helpless guests, may have pushed the envelope in terms of good taste, but its bloody denouement came as no surprise to lovers of tragic opera—or the classics.

The ancient Greeks regarded weddings as potentially very dangerous. Too much happiness was thought to incur the wrath of the gods. Only a prodigious number of sacrifices could stave off disaster, and even then the slightest mistake could upset all the careful preparations. A wedding day transformed into a funeral was a stock theme in Greek mythology and poetry. In one version of the Trojan War narrative, Iphigenia, the daughter of King Agamemnon, walks to the altar dressed as a bride, unaware that she is about to be killed to appease the goddess Artemis, who had held up the warriors’ voyage to Troy. Continue reading…