As Dr. Kalyanam Shivkumar pondered how to fix the human heart, he was given a gift laced with horror. Shivkumar, a cardiac electrophysiologist known as “Shiv” to friends and co-workers at UCLA, was trying to better understand the intricate details of nerves in the chest.
He hoped doing so might help him improve treatments for cardiac arrhythmias — aberrant rhythms of the heart — that can prove dangerous and even deadly . A Canadian colleague sent him a set of anatomy books renowned for the beauty and detail of their drawings, but tipped him off that the “atlas” had an appalling history. Shivkumar was aghast to learn it was the work of an ardent Nazi whose Vienna institute had dissected the bodies of prisoners, many executed for political reasons after Austria was annexed to Nazi Germany in 1938.
“Every time I open up that book,” he said, “my sense is revulsion.” Shivkumar is a big thinker, an erudite physician quick with an apt quotation, whose Westwood office is stacked with Sanskrit volumes of the Mahabharata alongside books about late Bruins basketball coach John Wooden . As he waded into the scholarly debate over using the tainted atlas, the doctor bristled at hearing others praise its illustrations as “unsurpassable.
” Much of the soul searching among physicians had revolved around when and how to use it. Shivkumar wanted to put those questions to bed. “Could we be better?” he asked.
“Could we not be making something that’s completely untai.