A new joint study penned by British and American cardiologists has concluded that patients fitted with artificial hearts may never truly feel pity, nor remorse nor a flicker of love for the rest of their lives.
The study, which will be published in The Lancet later this week, studied the emotional abilities of people suffering severe cardiovascular problems before and after they had been fitted with their cold, mechanical hearts.
Chief researcher Dr. Roy Goldsmith told us: “We have every reason to believe that the transplanting of what we in the profession call the ‘organ of the soul’ with a machine fashioned by the hands of man to transport blood by may well cause all human emotion to seep out of the patient, leaving them a husk.”
“Doctors in this field have long believed that replacing that essential piece of our bodies with a factory made product- all full of copper cogs, clockwork and steel pistons probably- would take something ineffable from a person. Something ancient and vital and....good.”
Dr. Goldsmith continued, “I had seen the symptoms before I began the study in earnest. I had seen the joie de vivre drain right out of their eyes as they woke up after the operation. Any good physician will know to look for that.”
“It naturally follows that surgically extracting the part of you that skips a beat when the love of your life looks at you for the first time would have some serious medical ramifications. This study reveals just how severe we believe that to be.”
However, despite his findings neither Dr. Goldsmith nor any of the other researchers have attempted to treat the heartlessness. Goldsmith told us: “I never broached the subject directly with any patient or subject. We reasoned that a person whose heart had been replaced with a lump of steel would have no hesitation in bludgeoning us to death with a terrible golem strength that could only be accessed by a person whose soul had been taken away and burned in a medical waste incinerator with a bunch of tumors and appendices”
“To confront one of them is to risk having your face slashed to ribbons while your assailant looks impassively down at you, feeling naught.”
The study, titled ‘The Telltale Heart’, advises healthcare professionals on how to spot the ‘heartless’ by their ‘cold dead eyes’ and through their reaction to topics such as baskets full of mewling newborn kittens and the film The Iron Giant. It also advises doctors to steer clear of the loveless automatons while calling for funding bodies to pledge more money to cardiology research so that “no more of these doomed and forlorn creatures need be created”
FP
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