Methuselah in Her Cradle, Dario Robleto

Heartbeats are physical and real; they are also ephemeral and fleeting. Recording a heartbeat as a pulse wave freezes a moment in time—a moment in a life—but before and after that moment, the heart beats on, the body it belongs to inevitably aging. The late 19th-century French physician and homeopath Charles Ozanam was the first to consider the relationship between heartbeats and aging, recording pulses from the newest infants to those who lived for more than a century, in the process creating what Robleto calls a “comparative time map of the human heart.” The delicate waveforms memorialized here represent the heartbeats of infants to ten-year-old children in 1886.