You Gotta Have Heart

At the risk of being called Ishmael, I have been sitting here on my duffel bag reading Moby Dick in the flickering glare of a three-way binnacle lamp, and brooding over a newspaper clipping pasted inside my sou'wester. "Record Is Sought Of Whale Heart," reads the curious legend nailed beneath the masthead of The New York Times. "2 Expeditions Aim to Take Electrocardiograms -- One Will Use Tranquilizer."

Scurrying down the ratlines of print with muffled cries of "Shiver me Mil-towns!" we learn that the two parties were all set to shove off from the quaint old port of Los Angeles "on hunts for whales on which to make heart experiments." Led by Dr. Paul Dudley White, the Eisenhower heart specialist, one of these expeditions was bound for Scammon Lagoon on the west coast of Lower California, where they would "hover over a whale nursery in a helicopter."

"The plan calls for darts to pierce the muscle tissue of the whale, then transmit by radio signal an electrocardiogram to specialists waiting on the beach," the Times yarn continues, copping the plea that "precise pulsebeats will add to scientific knowledge of human hearts."

"We'll put our electrodes into a mother whale from the air," Dr. White is quoted as saying. "We believe we can make our approach a little better that way than in a boat."

Now, I don't wish to be dragged into a sea-air controversy over the best way to approach a mother whale. As an able-bodied landlubber with a phobia against ferryboats and flying machines, it doesn't matter to me whether Dr. White and his trusty crew use surfboards, Sputniks or a fleet of old inner tubes. But I should think that being hovered over by a helicopter would make any whale so nervous and fidgety that a recording of precise pulsebeats would be impossible.

It was this consideration that prompted Dr. Frank G. Nolan, leader of the second whale chase, to enlist the aid of a tranquilizer. According to the same news account, Dr. Nolan planned to "lead an expedition of small boats in the Catalina Channel sea lane used by southbound whales off southern California." What the doctor's attitude would be toward northbound, westbound or cross-town whales, I don't know. The last I heard, he was eagerly pacing the poop-deck with a tranquilizer-tipped harpoon. The drug, he hoped, would produce "a very happy whale."

Offhand, it sounded as though it had already produced a very happy doctor. But I still couldn't see how a depth study of whale palpitations could add to the scientific knowledge of the human heart. Granted that whales are mammals, just like people -- but are we really coronary cousins? Brothers beneath the blubber?

In my thirst for further enlightenment, I began combing the local bars and beaches for notes in bottles that might offer some clue as to how the doctors made out. Peering into empties and whistling hornpipes, I was just getting to the point where I no longer cared, when along came a series of medical cliff-hangers written by Earl Ubell, Science Editor of the New York Herald Tribune. "Will You Have a Heart Attack?" Mr. Ubell shouted across the top of the page, like a hard-of-hearing houseboy passing the hors d'oeuvres.

"Heart attack." The words rattle like a machine gun ...

"Are you the muscular steel worker who feels a little numbing pain in your shoulder from time to time? Are you the diabetic housewife? Or the fast-paced executive who lives at his desk? Or the 70-year-old woman who lives alone?

"Which one will it be who staggers, clutches his fist to his chest, blinking and sweating with pain ...?"

Up until that moment, I had been feeling no pain at all. As a slow-paced non-executive type, with no more muscle than it takes to hoist a double bourbon and change the ribbon in my Smith-Corona, I had no trouble staying away from my desk for days at a time. True, my left foot sometimes got a little numb from sitting on it, and I have been known to stagger, but the only thing that made me blink and sweat was the machine-gun rattle of Mr. Ubell's prose:

"Sometimes the heart beats wildly -- 180 times a minute compared to a normal 90 times a minute. Sometimes it skips beats, and loses its syncopation ... the familiar and constant sound of lub-dub ... lub-dub ... lub-dub ... lub-dub ... may become lub-dub-dub ... lub-lub ..."

Picking up the beat of my own off-sync ticker, I found that it could also throb with a familiar and constant chug-a-lug ... drink-chug-a-lug ... chug-a-lug. As Mr. Ubell's series rolled on, however, the rhythm changed to a rapid tippy-tippy-tin of anxiety, because the more I read the worse my odds became.

"If you were a Bantu in South Africa or a Japanese in Japan your chances of suffering a heart attack would be small. You might be protected by your low fat diet, by your heredity or even by your way of life," he informed me, one bright, grim morning.

"But as an American you could, at any moment, become a victim of the greatest plague that has hit mankind since smallpox swept Europe ..."

A handicap chart based on "Diet Fat and Cholesterol" indicated that safe-money bets on coronary health could be made on the Japanese farmers of Koga, the clerks of Shime and the doctors of Fukuoka, with the Caucasians of Los Angeles running as no-can-do long shots. In fact, it appeared doubtful whether the average American male could run at all, what with smoking, overeating and working at a sedentary job.

I had just about decided to swear off food, cigarettes and sitting down, when Mr. Ubell pulled the rug out from under me with a chapter on the "Effect of Sexual Intercourse on a Weakened Heart." It seems that a certain Dr. William Dock, of the Palo Alto Medical Clinic, has discovered that "sexual intercourse imposes sustained circulatory stress comparable to that caused by running up four to nine flights of stairs." Worse yet, the late Dr. Ernst Boas, "who did one of the first studies of heart rate during sexual intercourse," found that "many cases of cardiac infarction (heart attack) occur during coitus."

That was it, as far as I was concerned.

Recalling that "as an American" I could, "at any moment, become a victim of the greatest plague that has hit mankind since smallpox swept Europe," I canceled all engagements that might involve running up stairs, and stretched out in my heart-saver chair to read the article through from the beginning.

"One of the most urgent questions asked by a recovering victim of a heart attack is:

"'May I have sexual intercourse without danger to my heart? Will I have another heart attack if I do?'"

To which Mr. Ubell replied: "This is a difficult question for the doctor to answer because there is little scientific information that can be used as a guide."

What information there was seemed pretty damned complete to me, however. For instance:

"Dr. Boas, in his pioneering work, measured the heart rate of various activities. The rate during sex orgasm was the highest, 148 times a minute. The others were: moderately violent exercise, 142; dancing, 130; eating, 102; sitting and talking, 107; telephoning, 106; walking, 118."

No score was given for sitting and reading heart-rate statistics, but I'm sure it was at least on a par with moderately violent drinking. Since Dr. Boas' studies were made back in the 1930s, I tried to console myself with the fact that his figures may have been high due to the emotional strain of celebrating Repeal and listening to Rudy Vallee records.

Not so. however.

Only last year Dr. Roscoe G. Bartlett and Dr. V. C. Bohr "reported new measurements made on three married couples during sexual intercourse," and "found that with heart rates that normally beat 70 to 80 times a minute, the rates jumped to 170 to 190 beats. The breathing rate tripled. The electrocardiograms showed abnormal and skipped beats, which never occurred when the couples later did exercise."

Whether they did toe-touches and push-ups or frolicked about courting cardiac infarctions with a spirited game of leapfrog, Mr. Ubell didn't say, but it's evident from the figures that the national pulse is pounding at a greater rate than at any time in recent history. In line with the general inflationary trend, the "physical effort and emotional excitement" of conjugal sex has risen 42 heartbeats in the past 20-odd years--an increase of almost half the number of lub-dubs required to eat or telephone when Dr. Boas made his pioneering studies in the 1930s. Reduced to its simplest terms, this would seem to indicate that a mid-Depression couple might have enjoyed a 148-beat orgasm under the NRA, and still have had 42 beats left over to put through a short call to the corner delicatessen, while the 190-beat couples of today are triple-breathing under a "sustained circulatory stress comparable to that caused by running up four to nine flights of stairs."

Pausing to catch our breaths, it behooves each of us to consider what the rates must be for unmarried couples -- and then ask, quite honestly, "May I have sexual intercourse without danger to my heart?"

Are all women walk-ups?

Is it not possible to meet love on a lower landing?

Is there no escalator to ecstasy?

Faced with blanks instead of answers, we can only hope that Doctors Nolan and White will come up with some sound scientific guidance. Though they may appear to be all at sea in their attempts to record the electrocardiograms of whales, I've come to suspect that they may be on the right track after all. Did not Melville speak of hovering over a whale herd and espying "young Leviathan amours in the deep"? Has he not made a footnote of the fact that "When overflowing with mutual esteem, the whales salute more hominum" -- in the same manner as humans?

Sulphur-bottom, humpback or sperm, we are all closer to being Moby Dicks than anyone who saw the movie might imagine. Open the book to Chapter LXXXVIII, for instance, where the Incomparable Herman describes the two predominant schools of whales: "those composed almost entirely of females, and those mustering none but young vigor-those males."

"Like a mob of young collegians," the males "are full of fight, fun, and wickedness, tumbling round the world at such a reckless, rollicking rate, that no prudent underwriter would insure them any more than he would a riotous lad at Yale or Harvard. They soon relinquish this turbulence though, and when about three fourths grown, break up, and separately go about in quest of settlements, that is, harems."

"In cavalier attendance upon the school of females, you invariably see a male of full grown magnitude ... In truth, this gentleman is a luxurious Ottoman, swimming about over the watery world, swimmingly accompanied by all the solaces and endearments of the harem ..."

It's a cinch that few Harvard or Old Eli grads ever had it as good as these free-style alumni of the 20,000 Ivy Leagues under the sea, and I'm all for manning the whaleboals and learning as much as we can.

"I was already aware that in the whaling business they paid no wages," Ishmael informs us, "but all hands, including the captain, received certain shares of the profits called lays, and that these lays were proportioned to the degree of importance pertaining to the respective duties of the ship's company. I was also aware that being a green hand at whaling, my own lay would not be very large; but considering that I was used to the sea, could steer a ship, splice a rope, and all that, I made no doubt that from all I had heard I should be offered at least the 275th lay -- that is, the 275th part of the clear net proceeds of the voyage, whatever that might eventually amount to. And though the 275th lay was what they call a rather long lay, yet it was better than nothing ..."

Which are my sentiments exactly.