A lion visits the doctor - heart & blood vessels in humans & animals

If you put a hand on your chest, you will feel it beating: your heart. It pumps blood around your body through the blood vessels. This is how human and animal bodies are supplied with energy. In the exhibition ‘A lion visits the doctor’, created together with Erasmus MC, you will see that not only you, but also each and every other vertebrate animal has a heart and blood vessels. The real hearts of, for example, a small-spotted catshark, a turtle and a penguin on display show both the differences and similarities between those hearts. Because although humans don’t really look like a blue whale or a guinea pig, the basic structure of each heart is pretty much the same. And the heart is actually a pretty clever thing.

Sometimes, however, things do not work properly within a human heart. Find out in the exhibition what a heart looks like then, feel how much work a sick heart has to do and find out what can be done about it. Doctors and researchers at the Erasmus MC Cardiovascular Institute are doing all they can to keep the human heart healthy or restore it back to health. In 1984, the first heart transplant in the Netherlands took place at Erasmus MC. Since then, many advancements have been made. Marvel at all that has happened since that first transplant in the field of prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular diseases, and at everything that was and is needed in an operating theatre. Watch a real operation and see how doctors keep a heart beating outside the body during transplantation. Come and learn all about the heart and blood vessels!

The exhibition ‘A lion visits the doctor - heart & blood vessels in humans & animals’ runs from 8 October 2023 to 9 June 2024.