To any doctor trained in today’s medical schools, the idea that the heart may not be a pump would, at first sight, appear to be about as logical as suggesting that the sun rises in the West or that water flows uphill. So strongly is the pump concept ingrained in the collective psyche that even trying to think otherwise is more than most people can manage. Yet Rudolf Steiner, a man not given to unscientific or slipshod thinking, was quite clear on the matter and reiterated time and again that the heart is not a pump. “The blood drives the heart, not the heart the blood.”
Ralph Marinelli* and his co-workers published a paper refuting the generally-accepted pressure-propulsion premise. For a start, they draw attention to the sheer volume of work which the heart would have to do if it were solely responsible for pumping inert blood through the vessels of the circulatory system. Blood is five times as viscous as water. According to the propulsion premise the heart would have to pump 8000 liters of blood a day in a body at rest and considerably more during activity, through millions of capillaries the diameters of which are sometimes smaller than the red blood cells themselves – a huge task for a relatively small, muscular organ weighing only 300 grams.
Once the questions start being asked, the anomalies in currently accepted dogma become apparent. For instance, if blood were pumped under pressure out of the left ventricle into the aorta during systole, the pressure pulse would cause the aortic arch to try and straighten out, as happens in any Bourdon tube pressure gauge. In practice the exact opposite happens; the curve increases, indicating that the aorta is undergoing a negative, rather than a positive, pressure.
Another paradoxical finding concerns the mechanics of fluid flow under pulsatile pressure. When a pressure pulse is applied to a viscous fluid in a closed vessel, the liquid initially resists movement through its own inertia. The pressure, therefore, peaks before the fluid velocity peaks. In the aorta, exactly the opposite happens where a peak flow markedly precedes peak pressure, a fact which was observed in 1860 by Chaveau and Lortet. So just what is going on inside the circulation?
Misleading sketch of the heart by Leonardo do Vinci (1). The left ventricle wall is shown uniform in thickness as it would he in a pressure chamber. Actually the left ventricle wall thickness varies by about 1800% as Marinelli and his group measured in bovine hearts (2). The apex wall is so soft and weak that it can be pierced with the index finger. The peculiar variability in the ventricular wall thickness is not in keeping with the heart as pressure generator. However, Leonardo’s Notebooks has been used in most biology, physiology, and medical texts during the last few hundred years as well as in most modern anatomy texts in the last decades (3). Thus, false sketches have served to bear witness to a false premise.
As Marinelli et al point out, the pressure-propulsion model of blood circulation rests on four major premises: (1) blood is naturally inert and must, therefore, be forced to circulate; (2) there is a random mix of formed particles in the blood; (3) blood cells are under pressure at all times; (4) blood is amorphous and is forced to fill its vessels and take on their form.
