Ernest Henry Starling (1866- 1927) is best known to cardiologists for his “Law of the Heart,” which describes the dependence of cardiac performance on end-diastolic volume. Starling’s research addressed a then puzzling observation, that stroke volume remains constant when afterload and heart rate are varied over a wide range. This led to the discovery that end-diastolic volume controls the work of the heart, which was the centerpiece of Starling’s Linacre Lecture given at Cambridge University in 1915...