Kalispell cardiologist Dr. Thomas Amidon and his brother, novelist Stephen Amidon, combined art and science to deliver “The Sublime Engine: A Biography of the Human Heart” to Rodale Press in time to publish just before Valentine’s Day.

“The timing was not a coincidence,” Thomas Amidon said with a laugh.

Their biography merges a history of the heart as a metaphor for love, courage and devotion together with a coronary chronicle of medical science cutting through superstition to reveal its anatomical secrets.

 Amidon credits his brother with blending the two into an entertaining and informative biography.

“I consider this my brother’s book that I helped him with,” he said. “If you’re reading about Shakespeare and Poe — that’s him. If you’re reading about plaque in the arteries, robotic surgery — I probably wrote that.”

Amidon joined the hospital eight months ago after working 15 years in Seattle.

Trained at Duke and Yale universities and the University of California, San Francisco, Amidon was cardiology section chief at Overlake Hospital in Bellevue, Wash., and had been medical director of Hope Heart Institute. The cardiologist has taught at the University of Washington and the University of California, San Francisco.

He and his wife Jean have three girls and one boy.

“We moved here because we wanted a lifestyle change,” Amidon said. “I was tired of sitting in traffic, and my wife was tired of the rain.”

He began working on his part of “The Sublime Engine” while his wife drove them back and forth between Seattle and the Flathead Valley on exploratory trips checking out communities and schools. His brother wrote his part on the opposite coast in Massachusetts.

According to Amidon, the idea for the book emerged when Stephen visited him in Seattle. At the time, his brother, the author of six novels and numerous critical essays and articles, was a writer-in-residence and English instructor at the University of Montana.

“He came to the hospital and watched me do a couple of complex procedures,” Amidon said.

During the visit, he and Stephen shared their interest in the history of the heart. His writer brother viewed the heart through the metaphors of religion, art and literature while Amidon, as a cardiologist, knew all the latest research and the queasy, humorous and daring experiments that had advanced heart medicine.

At Duke, he studied under Dr. David Sabiston, a preeminent pioneer of cardiac surgery who literally wrote the textbook on the subject.

“His class always had an emphasis on the history of medicine, to know who did the pioneering work,” Amidon recalled. “Who was it that said, ‘We can see so far because we stand on the shoulders of giants?’”

Stephen suggested that they co-author a book blending their two views into a biography of the heart. Amidon readily agreed since the two brothers, just a year apart, have always gotten along very well.

“We had six months of e-mailing back and forth,” Amidon said. “He wrote the part that is not medicine, then he would say, ‘This is what I need from you.’”

Amidon drew on many years of writing articles as well as serving as co-author of the cardiology chapter of a top-selling medical textbook. He credits his voracious appetite for short stories with inspiring the idea of his brother starting each chapter with a fictionalized version of a real character to draw the reader into their net.

As an example, the first chapter, “Ancient Heart” starts with a Greek merchant based on their grandfather who survived a heart attack in the 1950s. They moved the merchant back to 500 B.C., where he eventually receives treatment for a heart condition from Hippocrates, the father of medicine.

“Ironically, what they did back then was not that different from what they did in the 1950s in Detroit,” Amidon said. “They put you to bed and hoped.”

Other chapters feature characters such as a nun who had the base of a cross in her heart, a viscount with a lifelong “window” in his chest and Percy Bysshe Shelley, the famous poet whose heart refused to burn at cremation and was kept until death by his writer wife, Mary, in her writing desk.

Along with the Shelley story, the “Morbid Heart” chapter regales readers with chilling stories like the catheter made of a goose’s trachea attached to a glass tube and inserted into a live horse to measure blood pressure. The same inventor shoved a gun barrel through the neck and into the heart of a freshly-slaughtered sheep to pour in wax to cast and measure the heart’s chambers.

 As an interventional cardiologist, Amidon particularly appreciates the story in Chapter 5, “Current Heart,” a fictionalized account of Dr. Werner Forsmann, who put his life on the line in Germany in the 1920s to prove he could thread a catheter through an artery to the heart.

“He did a catheterization on himself,” he said.

Because of his many years of teaching and speaking, Amidon, 50, said his contributions didn’t require a lot of research. He still gives lectures 12 to 15 times a year.

“You do the same thing for 100 hours a week for 25 years, it’s amazing what you get to know,” he said.

Some fascinating facts include:

• The heart beats roughly 2.5 billion times in an average life span, pumping around 74 gallons of blood every hour in adults.

• Ancient Egyptians saw the heart as the part of a human that ascended to heaven on a winged beetle.

• The heart weighs only about 15 ounces but is incredibly strong, generating enough energy in a day to drive a car 20 miles.

• In 1415, Charles, Duke of Orleans, sent the first valentine on Feb. 14 as a love poem to his wife from the Tower of London.

• Scientists discovered an Italian family more or less immune to coronary artery disease. Researchers are working to replicate their unique genes to find a cure for the rest of humanity. 

Amidon said the book isn’t intended as a comprehensive biography or medical textbook of the human heart. He aimed to explain the heart and heart disease to a lay audience in an entertaining way.

Whether in lectures or speaking with patients, Amidon said he has always been about educating to prevent heart disease but never before put it in writing.

“If you are a good doctor, you’re teaching all the time,” he said. “The most effective way to educate people is to entertain them.”

When it comes to advice, Amidon said the things people can do to have the biggest impact on heart health remain eating a healthy diet, exercising and not smoking.

People interested in purchasing the book can find it online at Amazon.com, through local bookstores or at the Heart Health Fair from 5 to 8 p.m. Tuesday in the Arts & Technical Building at Flathead Valley Community College.

Reporter Candace Chase may be reached at 758-4436 or by e-mail at cchase@dailyinterlake.com.