The heart's veins
The blood that has fed the heart muscle returns by the heart's own veins. The great cardiac vein climbs the front beside the anterior interventricular artery and turns round the left side. The middle cardiac vein runs up the back between the ventricles, and the small cardiac vein follows the right coronary artery.
They empty into the coronary sinus, a wide vein a few centimetres long in the groove on the back of the heart between the left atrium and the left ventricle. It opens into the right atrium, just beside the opening of the inferior vena cava.
The back and underside of the heart: the coronary sinus and the great, middle and small cardiac veins, Gray's Anatomy, 1918, figure 491Wikimedia Commons, Henry Vandyke Carter, Public domain (Gray491.png)
A few small veins on the front open straight into the right atrium. At rest the heart muscle takes about 70 percent of the oxygen from the blood that passes through it. The body as a whole takes about a quarter.
Sources
- Susan Standring (ed.), Gray's Anatomy, 42nd ed. (2020), chapter on the heart.
- Arthur Guyton and John Hall, Textbook of Medical Physiology, 13th ed. (2016), ch. 21.
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