'It warms the cockles of my heart'
What a strange expression that is and yet I’d never really thought about its origins until today but it has been in use since the late 17th century.
Cockles are a type of shellfish, specifically marine bivalve molluscs supposedly associated with the heart because they have a similar shape when viewed from certain aspects. The German name for the cockle is Herzmuschel, meaning heart shell. One theory is that the heart’s ventricular fibres resembled the ridges on a cockle shell.
Richard Lower (1631-1691) was an English physician who studied the heart and experimented with blood transfusions. In 1667 he and Sir Edmund King transfused sheep’s blood into a man. This followed a series of transfusions in France by Jean-Baptiste Denis in 1667. He treated a sick young man with a transfusion of lamb’s blood and the man survived, as did the second man. His third and fourth patients died. Subsequently, in France and elsewhere, blood transfusions were not used until the middle of the 19th century. The first successful blood transfusion of human blood was conducted by James Blundell in 1818.
In 1669 Richard Lower produced a paper, Tractatus de Corde (A Treatise on the Heart) in which he wrote about the ventricles of the heart, the cochleae cordis. From this was derived ‘cockles of the heart’, when the heart was considered the seat of emotions.
Thus, the cockles of your heart are the deepest reserves of pleasurable warm emotion.
