Broken Heart

I had always assumed that a broken heart was just a metaphor, a cliché of country music and romance novels. So I was as surprised as anyone to learn that doctors now consider it a real medical event, one that can kill.

The news comes from a report published last month in the New England Journal of Medicine , in which physicians at Johns Hopkins described a group of 18 mostly older women and one man who developed serious heart problems after experiencing a sudden emotional shock, such as the death of a loved one, or, in the case...