“Quite often, I am asked why I chose to be a cardiologist. At one level, the answer is easy. Aged fourteen, I was drawn to the heart through the simple conviction that it is the ‘the most important bit’. Decades later, I am a practising cardiologist and professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Oxford, where my laboratory works to understand the cellular and molecular mechanisms of heart injury and repair. Over the years, I have come to realise that my sense of the pre- eminence of the heart has been shared by many, over millennia”.

In this month’s Balliol Online Lecture, Professor Robin Choudhury will reveal a cultural detective trail to try to understand how we have come to see the heart as we do. It is a story of the heart. He will discover how beautiful heart images illuminate society’s age-old dance between art, religion, philosophy and ‘scientific’ thinking. In each era, we meet saints, artists, lovers, scholars and eventually scientists who unwittingly influence each other, in approaching and building an understanding of the human heart.

Professor Robin Choudhury is Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Oxford and a practising cardiologist. His clinical expertise is in the treatment of heart attack and he also runs a laboratory working on molecular and cellular mechanisms of heart injury and repair. He has a particular interest in the role of inflammation in cardiovascular diseases.

He is a Fellow of Balliol College and of the Royal College of Physicians, and is a former Wellcome Senior Research Fellow. He has published over 200 academic papers and book chapters. He is co-editor of the Handbook of Cardiology Emergencies (OUP); and contributor to the Oxford Textbook of Medicine (OUP).