The Heart: Symbol of Life, Love, and Sacrifice in Anatomy
In Dana Schwartz's Anatomy, the heart operates as a concrete and recurring symbol that bridges the novel's physical and emotional worlds. Literally a muscular organ responsible for pumping blood, the heart appears in scenes of dissection, violent removal, and planned transplantation. Its symbolic meaning shifts from a clinical object of scientific inquiry to a vessel of love, identity, and sacrifice, ultimately tying together the novel's central themes of gender barriers in medicine, class inequality, ethics of medical experimentation, love vs societal duty, and mortality and the pursuit of knowledge.
What the Heart Literally Is
Anatomically, the heart is a four‑chambered organ with valves that control blood flow. When Hazel, disguised as George, is called to the front of Dr. Straine's class to remove a corpse's heart, she correctly names the four chambers and four valves from memory—right ventricle, left ventricle, right atrium, left atrium, and the aortic, tricuspid, pulmonary, and bicuspid valves. Yet when Straine orders her to identify those structures on the real organ, she cannot, because the heart in life "looks nothing like textbook diagrams" (Chapter 13). This gap between theory and practice underscores the novel's exploration of knowledge gained only through physical experience, a privilege largely denied to women.
Recurrence of the Heart in the Plot
The heart appears at critical moments, each time carrying a different symbolic weight.
The Rabbit Heart
In Dr. Beecham's first lecture, each student receives a dead rabbit to dissect. Hazel completes the task first, cleanly extracting the heart and other organs. Her classmate Thrupp throws a rabbit heart at her, which she defiantly squeezes in her fist. This moment establishes the heart as a tangible object that can be wielded as a weapon of humiliation or reclaimed as a badge of resilience. It also foreshadows Hazel's later confrontations with misogyny and her determination to claim her place in medicine.
The Missing Human Heart
When Hazel buys a corpse from resurrection man Jack Currer to practice for her physician's exam, she discovers the body has had its heart surgically removed. The severed arteries are cauterized, the veins sewn shut. This "yawning void" (Chapter 18) transforms the heart into a symbol of absence—of life, of identity, of humanity. The corpse is a woman who likely died at the hands of a doctor (later revealed to be Dr. Beecham) harvesting organs for his experiments. The missing heart becomes evidence of an unethical medical practice that treats the poor as disposable resources.
Beecham's Planned Heart Transplant
In Chapter 34, Dr. Beecham reveals his grand ambition: to transplant a living boy's heart into a dying nobleman—what he calls a "transposition." He captures Jack and prepares to cut out his heart to place into the body of a young baron. Here, the heart becomes a commodity, a pump that can be moved from one body to another in pursuit of extending the life of the wealthy. Beecham's casual cruelty—"I think I'll take his heart"—reduces the organ to a replaceable part, stripped of any emotional or spiritual significance. Yet for Jack and Hazel, the heart is the locus of love and identity.
Jack's Beating Heart in the Epilogue
The final page of the novel is a letter from Jack, postmarked New York, unsigned but unmistakable: "My beating heart is still yours, and I'll be waiting for you." This phrase reclaims the heart as a living, emotional center. Though Jack has survived the transplant attempt and fled, his heart—figuratively and literally—remains connected to Hazel. The "beating" heart contrasts with every cold, dissected, or stolen heart earlier in the story. It affirms that love endures beyond physical separation, beyond death itself.
How the Heart's Meaning Changes
The heart's symbolic meaning evolves as the novel progresses. Initially an object of study—something to be named, catalogued, and removed—it later becomes a marker of violation when found missing from a corpse. Beecham's transplant project turns the heart into a mechanical tool for playing God. Finally, Jack's declaration transforms the heart into a promise, making it the novel's most potent symbol of human connection. This progression mirrors Hazel's own journey: from seeking scientific knowledge by dissecting rabbits and cadavers, to recognizing the ethical limits of that knowledge, to embracing love as a force that cannot be dissected.
Character and Theme Connections
Hazel Sinnett
Hazel's relationship with the heart reflects her growth. In Straine's class, she can name its parts but cannot apply that knowledge to a real organ—a failure that exposes the limits of book‑learning. As she secretly dissects corpses in a dungeon, she learns through touch and sight. But she also learns that the heart is more than tissue: when she finds the corpse with a missing heart, she feels a pang of horror, sensing that someone treated a human body as a resource. By the end, Hazel uses her medical skill to heal the living, not to cut open the dead. The heart ceases to be a specimen and becomes a symbol of what she will fight to preserve.
Jack Currer
Jack is introduced as a resurrection man who sells corpses for dissection. He is poor, illiterate, and viewed by society as disposable. When Beecham nearly steals his heart for a nobleman, Jack becomes a stand‑in for all the forgotten poor whose bodies are exploited by the medical establishment. His letter's promise that his beating heart still belongs to Hazel insists on his humanity. The heart is what ties him to her, transcending class barriers and physical distance.
Dr. Beecham
Beecham treats the heart as a machine part. He views attachment as weakness, telling Hazel, "Attachments are pain." His planned transplant is the ultimate expression of this ideology: he sees nothing wrong in killing one person to extend the life of another, because he reduces the heart to a mere pump. His words in Chapter 34—"pleasure is fleeting; science, the information you can gather… these are what last"—directly contrast with the epilogue's embrace of enduring love.
Dr. Straine
Straine uses the heart to test and humiliate students. When Hazel correctly names the chambers and valves, he forces her to demonstrate on a real corpse, knowing she will fail. The heart here becomes a gatekeeping device—a tool to exclude women from medicine by setting an impossible standard of "hands‑on" experience they are barred from obtaining.
Themes
- Gender barriers: The heart's anatomy is a test Hazel can pass in theory but not in practice because women are not allowed to dissect human bodies. Straine's cruelty and Hazel's eventual success by illegally obtaining corpses highlight the structural sexism of 19th‑century medicine.
- Class inequality: The poor are the source of cadavers—and potential transplant donors—for the wealthy. The missing heart of a pauper and Beecham's plan to harvest Jack's heart for a baron illustrate how the medical establishment exploits the lower classes.
- Ethics of medical experimentation: Beecham's disregard for consent and his willingness to kill for "progress" raises questions about the limits of scientific ambition. The novel implicitly critiques the historical abuses of anatomy, such as the Burke and Hare murders.
- Love vs societal duty: Hazel must choose between a conventional life with Bernard Almont or a forbidden pursuit of medicine and love with Jack. Her final choice—to continue healing and to wait for Jack—affirms love as worth the social cost.
- Mortality and the pursuit of knowledge: The epigraph from Frankenstein states, "To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death." The heart symbolizes the paradox of seeking life through the dead. Hazel's skill grows from dissecting corpses, but her humanity is preserved by refusing to treat the living as objects.
Study Questions
1. Why does Hazel fail to identify the valves on the real heart in Straine's class? What does this scene reveal about the limitations of book learning?
Answer: Hazel memorized diagrams from textbooks, but the actual heart looks "oddly shaped, nonsymmetrical, fatter on one end than the other, coated on one half with a thick beige plaque." No diagram can prepare a student for the variation of a real organ or the tactile experience of handling it. The scene reveals that formal medical education in the novel privileges theoretical knowledge that only men can obtain through practice, creating an artificial barrier for women.
2. How does the missing heart in Chapter 18 function as a clue for the novel's central mystery?
Answer: The surgical removal of the heart—cauterized veins and sewn arteries—indicates a deliberate, professional extraction, not the work of animals or grave robbers. This clues Hazel (and the reader) that someone with medical training, later revealed to be Dr. Beecham, is harvesting organs from the poor. It sets up the climax where Beecham attempts to transplant Jack's heart.
3. Compare Beecham's view of the heart with Jack's in the epilogue. What does each character's treatment of the heart say about their moral philosophy?
Answer: Beecham sees the heart as a replaceable mechanical part—he is willing to cut it out of a living person to prolong another's life, believing that "attachments are pain" and science justifies any action. Jack, by contrast, calls his heart "beating" and offers it to Hazel as a symbol of enduring devotion. Where Beecham dehumanizes the heart, Jack re‑humanizes it, insisting that love—not scientific progress—is what makes life meaningful.
4. In your own interpretation, does the epilogue's phrase "my beating heart is still yours" suggest that Jack survived the transplant attempt, or is it meant metaphorically? Support your answer with evidence from the text.
Answer: The epilogue is deliberately ambiguous. Jack's letter arrives from New York, implying he escaped. Earlier, Hazel had offered him the immortality tonic, which he refused. The phrase "beating heart" can be read literally—he is alive—or metaphorically, that his love endures even if he died. The novel leaves the question open, allowing readers to choose hope over certainty. Schwartz never confirms Jack's fate, making the letter a testament to Hazel's unwavering belief in their connection.