A leading cardiologist and author of Doctored and Intern examines the recent dismantling of historical taboos and the development of transformative heart procedures that have changed how we live and what we understand about illness. The bestselling author of Intern and Doctored tells the story of the thing that makes us tickFor centuries, the human heart seemed beyond our understanding: an inscrutable shuddering mass that was somehow the driver of emotion and the seat of the soul. As the cardiologist and bestselling author Sandeep Jauhar shows in Heart: A History, it was only recently that we demolished age-old taboos and devised the transformative procedures that have changed the way we live.Deftly alternating between key historical episodes and his own work, Jauhar tells the colorful and little-known story of the doctors who risked their careers and the patients who risked their lives to know and heal our most vital organ. He introduces us to Daniel Hale Williams, the African American doctor who performed the worlds first open heart surgery in Gilded Age Chicago. We meet C. Walton Lillehei, who connected a patients circulatory system to a healthy donors, paving the way for the heart-lung machine. And we encounter Wilson Greatbatch, who saved millions by inventing the pacemakerby accident. Jauhar deftly braids these tales of discovery, hubris, and sorrow with moving accounts of his familys history of heart ailments and the patients hes treated over many years. He also confronts the limits of medical technology, arguing that future progress will depend more on how we choose to live than on the devices we invent. Affecting, engaging, and beautifully written, Heart: A History takes the full measure of the only organ that can move itself.
