Heart: A History by Sandeep Jauhar

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 inHeart:

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.