Volume 21, Number 5 · April 4, 1974
How to Be Your Own Worst Enemy
By P.B. Medawar
Type A Behavior and Your Heart
by Meyer Friedman MD, by Ray H. Rosenman MD
Knopf, 276 pp., $7.95
It is not very surprising that, pounding away as they do, day and night, the muscles of the heart need a rich supply of blood. One might be tempted to think that with blood sloshing around in the heart all the time, nothing much more was needed, but nothing could be farther from the truth: special arteries, the coronary arteries, supply the musculature of the heart; indeed, about 5 percent of the heart's output of arterial blood is appropriated to its own nourishment. The coronaries are thus the most important arteries in the body and coronary heart disease (CHD) is proportionately important as a cause of distress, ill health, or death—nowadays affecting people in their mid-thirties and early forties as well as in later life. The menace of CHD is fully recognized and fearfully acknowledged in the form of the many jujus by means of which people try to propitiate the angry god; among their number Friedman and Rosenman report: take no animal fats / soft water / sugar; jog / jog not; so perhaps we should not be surprised to learn that abstention from sexual intercourse is included in this collection, for it is part of the Puritan ethic that any activity so pleasurable must be harmful.
Review, 2342 words
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