My cultural awakening: Leonardo da Vinci made me rethink surgery – I’ve since mended more than 3,000 hearts

For one heart surgeon, seeing the Renaissance artist’s anatomical drawings gave him a natural understanding of the body that was often overlooked in modern medical science

If you’d asked my teenage self, growing up in a small village in Shropshire, what I wanted to do with my life, I would have talked about art and music long before I spoke of scalpel blades and operating theatres. As an 18-year-old, I intended to go to art school, until my mother sat me down and told me rather bluntly that being an artist wouldn’t earn me much money. As she spoke, a surgical documentary flickered across the screen of the black-and-white television in our living room. I told her, half joking, that that was what I’d do instead. Which is how I ended up repeating my A-levels and fighting my way into medical school, where I qualified in 1975.

By 1986, I was a consultant cardiothoracic surgeon at Papworth hospital in Cambridge, repairing failing hearts in a nascent field of medicine. Since then I’ve repaired more than 3,000 mitral valves – more than any surgeon in the UK – but the work that truly reshaped me came not from a textbook but from an encounter with centuries-old drawings.

It was 1977, and I was working at Charing Cross hospital in London for my clinical training. One morning, I was walking past the Royal Academy and saw it was hosting an exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical drawings, the first proper display of the works in the country.

I went in, and was awestruck: the works emanated such unexpected warmth and humanity. I had studied Leonardo at A-level, but to see the drawings in person was something else. Leonardo was hugely interested in scientific matters – he dissected about 30 human corpses and many more animals, recording his findings in hundreds of detailed drawings and notes. I was fascinated not just by the stunning beauty of the line, but also by the insistence in his notes that everything in nature had purpose and form.

I began to draw connections between his work and my own – at the time, mitral valve surgery was very much about imposing solutions on the valve, rather than trying to re-establish the body’s natural physiology. I started to think about how the valve actually worked in nature, and began to wonder if I could adjust my surgery accordingly, to make it a more physiological approach.

Mitral valve repair in its earlier form worked, but it could compromise natural movement – particularly for younger, more active patients. It made me question how didactic heart surgery had become: when the stakes are so high, surgeons tend to follow prescribed techniques because they’re safe, defensible and unlikely to attract blame. Leonardo didn’t tell me how to operate, but he did change how I thought, encouraging me to work with the heart’s natural design rather than reshaping it into something almost prosthetic.

I’ve always believed that art and science can nourish each other. At Papworth, I’ve invited several artists in residence to work alongside me, and I encourage students to think in a broad, almost artistic way. I think both fields will make more progress by learning from each other. In 2013 I wrote a book about my findings, called The Heart of Leonardo. It contains all of Leonardo’s drawings on the heart and its physiology, interpreted in light of modern knowledge, comparing his illustrations with contemporary images.

I still paint and draw in my free time, and this month one of my own drawings hung in an exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, raising funds for children’s heart surgery with the charity Chain of Hope. I’ve worked with the charity for more than a decade, providing life-saving operations for children in Ethiopia, where heart disease is still devastatingly common. It sounds strange to say that a Renaissance artist remade my surgical practice, but that’s precisely what happened. It was my training that taught me the fundamentals of medicine, but it was Leonardo who taught me that to heal a heart, you need first to understand its life in motion, and look at it with an artistic and open eye.

Did a cultural moment prompt you to make a major life change? Email us at cultural.awakening@theguardian.com