Heart: A History

Synopsis

The bestselling author of Intern and Doctored tells the story of the thing that makes us tick

For 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 world’s first open heart surgery in Gilded Age Chicago. We meet C. Walton Lillehei, who connected a patient’s circulatory system to a healthy donor’s, paving the way for the heart-lung machine. And we encounter Wilson Greatbatch, who saved millions by inventing the pacemaker—by accident.

Jauhar deftly braids these tales of discovery, hubris, and sorrow with moving accounts of his family’s history of heart ailments and the patients he’s 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.

Copyright:

2018

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9780374717001

Related ISBNs:

9780374168650

Publisher:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Date of Addition:

02/10/20

Copyrighted By:

Sandeep Jauhar

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

History, Nonfiction, Biographies and Memoirs, Medicine

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.