2018-12-25

perpendicular perpendicularly

It's much easier to draw your shapes perpendicularly and then to rotate them into place when you're done. 

【NYTimes】How Emotions Can Affect the Heart

despair 

Though not widely appreciated at the time, studies now show that stress and despair can significantly influence health, especially that of the heart.

cardiologist

cardiovascular 

cardiac 

cardiology 

The link between emotional health and heart health is the subject of a new book, “Heart: A History,” by Dr. Sandeep Jauhar. Dr. Jauhar, a cardiologist, traces the history of cardiovascular medicine and explores its remarkable technological advances, from open-heart surgery to the artificial heart. But while these cardiac innovations have been transformative, Dr. Jauhar argues that the field of cardiology needs to devote more attention to the emotional factors that can influence heart disease, like unhappy relationships, poverty, income inequality and work stress.

iterative 

marshal

“I think the iterative technological advances will continue,” he said. “But the big frontier is going to be in marshaling more resources to address the intersection of the emotional heart and the biological heart.”

malignant 

paternal 

Dr. Jauhar’s interest in this subject stems from his family’s malignant history with heart disease, which killed several of his relatives. As a young boy, he heard stories about his paternal grandfather, who died suddenly at the age of 57 when a frightening encounter with a black cobra in India caused him to have a heart attack.

executioner 

 in the prime of their lives

I had this fear of the heart as the executioner of men in the prime of their lives

workhorse

The heart, simply put, is a pump that circulates blood. But it is also an astonishing workhorse. It is the only organ that can move itself, beating three billion times in the average person’s lifetime, with the capacity to empty a swimming pool in a week. This is why surgeons did not dare to operate on it until the end of the 19th century, long after other organs had already been operated on, including the brain.

suture

“You can’t suture something that’s moving, and you couldn’t cut it because the patient would bleed to death,” Dr. Jauhar said.

intrepid

deftly

necessitate

 congenital defects

In his new book, Dr. Jauhar tells the stories of the intrepid doctors who pioneered cardiovascular surgery in the late 19th century, cutting open patients to deftly repair acute wounds with needles and catgut before quickly closing them back up to avoid heavy bleeding. More complicated procedures, however, necessitated more sophisticated machinery. Surgeons needed a device that could take over the job of the heart so they could temporarily stop the organ from beating and cut into it to repair congenital defects and other chronic problems.

aghast

“His critics were aghast,” said Dr. Jauhar. “They said, this is the first operation in the history of mankind that could kill not one but two people.”

succumbed 

Some of Dr. Lillehei’s patients survived. Others succumbed to infections and other complications. But the work he did allowed others to develop the heart-lung machine, which today is used in more than a million cardiac operations around the globe each year. 

drop by tenfold

Nationwide, heart disease is still the leading killer of adults. But cardiovascular medicine has grown by leaps and bounds: Mortality after a heart attack has dropped tenfold since the late 1950s.

be wrapped up in 

rat race

inordinate

healthfully

“I used to be so wrapped up in the rat race that I was probably putting an inordinate amount of stress on myself,” he said. “Now I think about how to live a little more healthfully, to live in a more relaxed way. I have also bonded more with my patients and their fears about their own hearts.”

【Economist】Japan's wartime abuses: Shackles of the past

colonisation 

thorny 

Japan’s actions during the second world war cast a long shadow, especially in South Korea. Only in 1965, twenty years after Japan’s colonisation of the Korean peninsula ended, did the two countries agree to re-establish relations. They have been thorny ever since. 

authoritarian

in part

ficklenss

rancour

It does not help that the South Korean regime that made peace with Japan was an authoritarian one, which cared more about economic development than history or justice. “Nobody here listened to the victims before South Korea became democratic,” says Lim Jae-sung, the lawyer for the plaintiffs against Nippon Steel. The collapse, in part due to the South Korean government’s fickleness, of an agreement between the two countries on compensation for Korean women forced into sexual slavery during the war has added to the rancour.