I find it interesting that the notion of chest pain transcends a broad range of disciplines. As clinicians, we tend to narrow this to cardiac disease (or, more specifically, coronary artery disease [CAD]) until proven otherwise. Yet, historically, chest pain was more closely aligned with emotion rather than disease, encapsulated in the notion of a ‘broken heart’, as typified in a play by John Ford, published in 1633.2 The concept appears to have first appeared in Pharaonic Egypt, third millennium BCE, when the vital force of the soul was in the heart.3 As recently as the nineteenth century, there remained substantial opposition to the idea of a physical rather than a psychological basis for heart pain.4