[Verse 1]
Seventeen ninety-eight, a candlelit room,
Wilson leans close to a heart out of tune,
One vessel only, where two should divide,
The truncus arteriosus, laid open and wide.
Through the eighteen-hundreds the pathologists came,
Sketching the silence no scalpel could name.
[Verse 2]
Buchanan in eighteen sixty-four,
Traces the septum that never tore,
Charts every cusp and every seam,
Turns a strange curiosity into a theme.
He gives it dimension, a shape we can hold,
The first careful portrait of a heart growing old.
[Chorus]
Sing the names, keep the thread,
Wilson, Buchanan, the words that they said,
One trunk carries the blood of the whole,
Four types, then five letters, a nosology's toll —
That's the science of how we divide and we call,
History layered like plaster on an old church wall.
[Verse 3]
Nineteen forty-nine, the Mayo Clinic halls,
Collett and Edwards among the marble walls,
One hundred sixteen hearts laid out in a row,
Types one through four, a postwar tableau.
Where the pulmonary arteries choose to depart
Decides which numeral gets stitched to the heart.
[Verse 4]
Nineteen sixty-five, the Van Praaghs arrive,
Segment by segment they keep it alive,
Pseudotruncus cast out, no longer type four,
A1 through A4, and B waits at the door.
The argument echoes in journals today,
A palimpsest science keeps writing over, they say —
old text beneath new text, but nothing thrown away.
[Chorus]
Sing the names, keep the thread,
Wilson, Buchanan, the words that they said,
One trunk carries the blood of the whole,
Four types, then five letters, a nosology's toll —
That's the science of how we divide and we call,
History layered like plaster on an old church wall.
[Bridge]
Two thousand and something, the nomenclature bends,
One name for the trunk, and the old feuding ends,
"Common arterial trunk," a truce carved in ink,
While embryologists trace where the story might link.
Kirby in the eighties, watching neural crest cells migrate,
Twenty-two Q eleven, TBX1, the gene that miscalculates.
[Verse 5]
From candlelight tables to double-helix maps,
The heart keeps its secret through centuries and gaps,
Wilson could not know what a chromosome meant,
But the artery he drew is the same one we've bent
Into molecules, migration, and name —
One truncus, one mystery, one long-running claim.
[Outro]
So hum the timeline, low and slow,
Wilson to Kirby, watch the knowledge grow,
One trunk becomes types, becomes segments, becomes genes,
The palimpsest heart still tells us what it means.