The Book of the Heart by Louisa Young

Nearly 40 years ago, Louisa Young's father Wayland, Lord Kennet, wrote Eros Denied, a gloriously provocative, richly multicultural history of sexual repression, which deserves the credit for breaking English publishers' taboo on the verb "fucking". Now his daughter has written an equally ravishing, celebratory and funny history of the human heart. There is a sequence between these two superb books: they trace how we have matured from a 1960s fixation with squelching. After a generation, love seems more spectacular than sex. Until you love someone, Louisa Young seems to say, nothing makes any sense.

Drawing on visual arts, musical lyrics, cardiac medicine and her own idiosyncratic sense of the world, she honours the human heart for its symbolism and its duties. These duties, as a little child tells her, are "to keep you alive, and to let you love someone".

Like her subject, The Book of the Heart is divided into four chambers. In the first, she gives a readable, quirky history of anatomical knowledge of the heart, a factual account of its physical workings, a terrifying summary of diseases, and an overview of cardiac medicine from a Babylonian tablet of 2000BC until the era of transplant surgery. This section brims with startling statistics, gruesome facts and vivid anecdotes. There is something heroic about the 18th-century physician John Hunter studying himself in the mirror while having angina attacks, and recording his symptoms as a way of understanding the disease.

The second chamber examines the heart as a religious and magical emblem. The Immaculate Heart of Mary, the Wounded Heart of Man, the Cult of the Sacred Heart, and Aztec human sacrifices are among Young's topics. So, too, is cannibalism, including Mike Tyson's threat to Lennox Lewis ("I want to rip his heart out and feed it to him"), and the doom of Sir Charles McCarthy. When deep in the rainforest, McCarthy ordered his regimental band to play "God Save the King" as a signal to Ashanti warriors to disperse, for which misjudgement his heart was ceremonially eaten on the banks of the Bonsu river.

The third chamber looks at the depiction of the heart by artists, and the meanings of its representation. This includes a heartfelt defence of the role of kitsch in religious art. The fourth chamber celebrates lovers' hearts. Here Young's wise and gentle discussion of broken hearts juxtaposes the prophet Jeremiah with Al Green ("How can you mend a broken heart?"), and quotes Damien Hirst, Oscar Wilde, the 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi and John Donne, among others. Blondie's "Heart of Glass", Bruce Springsteen's "Hungry Heart" and The Yardbirds' "Heart Full of Soul" jostle on the page with Matthew Arnold and a 15th-century King of Naples. Young really knows what she is talking about.

The book closes with macabre but gleeful notes on the fate of famous people's hearts. A cat ate Thomas Hardy's before it could be transferred to Westminster Abbey. Sir Nicholas Crisp's was put in a monument at Hammersmith, and given a refreshing glass of wine on the anniversary of its entombment – a practice that was continued for 150 years.

There is a delectable recipe for pigs' hearts cooked in marmalade and orange liqueur, and dodgy advice from Italy on how to interpret dreams of hearts so as to win the lottery. Despite its compact format, the book is generously illustrated, with Botticelli, Giotto, Victorian Valentine cards, Munch and Yves Saint Laurent among the images reproduced in colour.

The Book of the Heart makes emotive reading. It entranced me, and caused a lifestyle revolution. While reading it, I stopped using salt or butter, gave up booze, started jogging and, for the first time ever, started making doting daily phone calls to my Significant Other, hundreds of miles away. This ambitious book could so easily be pretentious, but instead remains disarming, canny and beguiling. Young modestly compares it to a vegetable soup – "if you find one bit not to your taste, move on, feel free – all the flavours connect up". It is more like Jack Horner's dream of a Christmas pie: wherever you put in your thumb, you will dig out the juiciest of plums. It deserves to become a cult book.

Richard Davenport-Hines's 'The Pursuit of Oblivion: a global history of narcotics' is published by Phoenix