When Healing Becomes Educating, Vol. 6 - Waldorf Research Institute

environment is produced at the site where the light is reflected in the retina.
The sites where interruption occurs are actually in the retinal nerves. In the
ram, the site corresponding to the “image” created in the eye would be the
point where the valve interrupts flow and reverses it.
These analogies taken from the field of physics immediately make us
see the heart in a new way: as a sense organ for the blood stream. This does,
of course, only relate to the superficial, physical aspect of its function, but
it brings to mind the sensitive valvular functions of the heart and especially
also the reversal of flow at the apex, both of which may be seen as organic
ram functions.
In the human blood circulation, which we can experience in heart beat
and peripheral pulse, the rate of flow is approximately 5 liters a minute.
A much larger volume exists in the tissues, in organs and muscles and
in the nervous system. Between this tissue fluid, which also includes the
lymphatic system, and the pulsating vascular system lies the capillary system.
Blood passes from one leg of the capillary system into the tissue fluid and is
absorbed back into the capillary system by the other leg. This is where the
living (intermediary) exchange processes of metabolism, internal respiration
and anabolism take place in the human organism. Recent researches have
shown that the volume passing between tissue fluid and capillaries is 100
liters a minute. 5 This makes it practically impossible to go on thinking of a
pump, since a pump with 5-liter capacity cannot possibly move 100 liters in
the periphery. Scientists who established earlier theories of the circulation
identified the same problem, though in a different way. Their solution was
to include additional, smaller “extracardial pumps” in organs and vessels
between the periphery and the heart. Kolisko drew attention to the issue.
If one thinks in terms of living, moving peripheral waves of fluid, the
heart, being part of the blood stream, becomes the mirroring apparatus,
rather like a hydraulic ram. M. Mendelsohn, a Berlin cardiologist, was fully
in accord with this when he wrote in 1928: “... [T]he heart must inevitably
be a secondary organ inserted into the circulation of fluids in a living
organism; it cannot be the primary, dominant organ.” 6 Rudolf Steiner was
thinking along the same lines when he said in 1921: “This human heart
evolves entirely from the... [interaction between nutrition and] tissue fluid
[with protein synthesis], and its function can be none other but to reflect
the inner activity of the tissue fluid.” 7 Thus the 100 liters a minute are
like living, flowing waves, with the heart placed among them. The heart
beat then reflects the waves, so that the periphery is mirrored at the center.
When physicians feel a patient’s pulse (or listen to the heart) they are using
touch to perceive a thermometer which indicates the internal conditions of
life. Kolisko made reference to pathology at this point: “The heart can only
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