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 best-selling 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, combining his family's own moving history of heart disease with gripping scenes from the operating theater, 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. It's so bound up in our deepest feelings that it can physically change shape when we experience emotional trauma.įor 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. The spark of life, fount of emotion, house of the soul - the heart lies at the center of every facet of our existence.
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