The Brandon news. (Brandon, Miss.) 1892-1961, 1910-01-20
HUMAN HEART IS
MARVELLOUS ORGAN
CAN LIFT TWENTY-FIVE POUNDS
IN SIXTY SECONDS-STRONG-
EST OF MUSCLES.
Can be Kept Aiive for Days By I'm
mersing in Water-Beats after
Head is Removed.

Lifts eighteen tons in one day.
In seventy years will lift a weight
amounting to half millions TONS
1t contracts 100000 times in twenty
four hours, 100000 times in twelve
months, and in a lifetime of seventy
years 3.ooo,ooo,ooo times.
The most powerful of all machines
known-more powerful than locomotive
for weight.
Could lift itself from the earth straight
out into space at the rate of 10000 feet
an hour.
Can be kept alive for days by i'm
mersing in a solution of salt
Beats for hours sometimes after the
head has been removed.
One night last July the staff of sur
geons at the City Hospital were just
Completing a most remarkable opera
ton, says writer in the St. Louis Rebuff
lie. A young man had been stabbed
through the lower part of the heart He
was still living after being brought in an
automobile over six or seven miles of
streets at a terrific rate of speed. He was
hurried to an operating table and the
chest cavity opened by cutting sort of
trap door through the chest wall, ribs
and muscles. Twelve stitches were taken
in the quivering chunk of muscle that had
not lost a beat in spite of the gap
ing wound through half its structure.
After it was all over and the patient pale
and bloodless, was sleeping quietly, the
white-coated assistant remarked to his
chief: "The most wonderful hing ever
expect TO see." And the chief replied
at was wonderful, but that piece of mus
Gle is the strangest thing known to
science"
The young man with the gashed
heart lived and is still living but it
led to a revival of interest among To-
cal Psychologists with regard to the
'blood pump" of the human frame. at
is the pendulum of life," said late
writer, and he asserts the human brain
is the ticking escapement that clicks fast
or slow, as our heart pendulum swings
out its measured beats. "Our brains are
75-year-old clocks" said he, Sand the an
gel of life winds them up once and for
all, closes the case and gives the key into
the hands of the Angel of Resurrection
Tick tack, tick tack, go the wheels of
thought, our will cannot stop them, they
cannot stop themselves. Sleep cannot stop
them, madness alone makes them go faster
Death alone can break into the case and,
Selling the over-swinging pendulum which
we call the heart silence at last the click
ing of the terrible escapement we have
carried So long beneath our wrinkled fore
heads"
The heart at the harvest is only
mere fraction at the body weight Yet
this tiny lump of muscle lifts during
such lifetime as we sometimes see,
over half million tens of sheer weight
In the course of one minute it will lift
a weight Of twenty-five pounds, in an
hour sixty times that, or 1900 pounds.
This is allowing for a beat of eighty
to the minute, although the theoretical
number per minute for the person in
perfect health is seventy-two. In a day
of twenty-four hours the weight of the
blood handled by this tireless little pump
amount up to the grasd total of 36,oooI
pounds, or eighteen tons. Every time the
heart contracts it forces FIVE ounces of life
fluid out into the sweeping arteries
that carry it over the body like mains
of great hot water system.
In reality there is about twenty
pounds of blood in the human body,
but this is point of which, strange as
it may seem, the words greatest physi-
ologists have never been able to agree
But there is no disagreement in the mat
ter of the number of the beats. In al
day it contracts and expands in round
numbers 100000 times, separately and
distinctly. In year it has performed the
same action 100000 times so truly
and so accurately that many persons new
er know where the heart is located unless
its place is revealed to them by disease
or accident In many individuals who
live to ripe age the tireless little
engine of the body has contracted and
relaxed over s,ooo,ooo,ooo times without
ever missing beat
The last century was one of me-
chanical wonders. Machines were made
that seemed to have the power of the
Titans, who moved mountains: steel
and iron were made to seem almost human
in their intelligence, incredible amounts
of work were turned out by these mon
sters of metal and out by these monsters
of metal and wood, but 50 far no machine