"The cardiologist Sandeep Jauhar has become a Dante of modern medicine, with his earlier memoirs, “Intern” (2008) and “Doctored” (2014), casting the progress from training to career as a path studded with suffering, indignity and ethical hazard. Both primer and ode, Heart is a fascinating education for those of us who harbor this most hallowed organ but know little about it. And over the ensuing pages, is our trusty guide through a compelling story about what makes each and every one of us tick. Jauhar hooks the reader of Heart from the first few pages." -Randi Hutter Epstein, The New York Times Book Review The tone-a physician excited about his specialty-takes a sharp turn from his first two memoirs. " gripping new book, Heart a History, had me nearly as enthralled with this pulsating body part as seems to be. Shortlisted for the 2019 Wellcome Book Prize Affecting, engaging, and beautifully written, Heart: A History takes the full measure of the only organ that can move itself.Ī PBS NEWSHOUR-NEW YORK TIMES BOOK CLUB PICKĪ Science Friday Best Science Book of 2018Ī Los Angeles Public Library Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 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.
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. And we encounter Wilson Greatbatch, who saved millions by inventing the pacemaker-by accident.
Walton Lillehei, who connected a patient’s circulatory system to a healthy donor’s, paving the way for the heart-lung machine. He introduces us to Daniel Hale Williams, the African American doctor who performed the world’s first open heart surgery in Gilded Age Chicago. 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.ĭeftly 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. The bestselling author of Intern and Doctored tells the story of the thing that makes us tickįor 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.
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