Cardiovascular System – Anatomy of the Heart

00:09 Hello. I'm Joseph Alpert, professor of Medicine at the University of Arizona in the United States.

00:15 And also, the editor in chief of the American Journal of Medicine.

00:19 So, let's start with something very basic.

00:22 Let's start with the anatomy of the heart and the blood vessels.

00:25 Now, many of you, of course, receive hearts when you receive letters from friends or close, intimate relations.

00:36 At Valentine's Day, we see the heart, of course, the heart shape.

00:40 Actually, the heart doesn't look anything like that. That's just a symbol for the heart.

00:45 In fact, what you see here in this little diagram is a little bit more what the heart looks like.

00:51 The heart is conical in shape with a rounded point, not a sharp point and, of course, it is a pump.

00:58 It's a muscle pump that keeps the circulation continuously going in a circle.

01:03 So, what happens, of course, I think everybody knows is the heart pumps the blood out full of oxygen and nutrients to the cells throughout the body. And then, waste products are given to the blood.

01:15 The blood returns to the lungs, a deep blue, and is then re-oxygenated, gets oxygen again, and pumped out to the body.

01:23 There's a continuous circle going on of the circulation.

01:28 Here's a diagram that shows you how the heart lies in the chest.

01:32 Notice that it's not directly in the center of the chest. In fact, it's slightly to the left.

01:37 In this view, of course, it looks like it's to the right but if you were standing behind this person where the heart bulges out would be the left and you can see four points are marked on this skeleton with the heart drawn behind it, behind the ribs, of course, and the breastbone which we call the sternum.

01:56 You can see that there are four heart valves and the points that are marked here are the places where we listen with our stethoscope when we want to hear that particular valve.

02:06 So, and we're gonna go over the names of the valves and where they're located but you just, for introduction, you can see that they're the aortic valve, the pulmonic valve, the tricuspid valve and the mitral valve.