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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 cardiologist and bestselling author Sandeep Jauhar shows in The Heart, it was only recently that we demolished age-old taboos and devised the transformative procedures that changed the way we live. Deftly alternating between 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, braiding those tales of discovery, hubris, and sorrow with moving accounts of the patients he's treated over the years. He also confronts the limits of medical technology, boldly arguing that future progress will depend more on how we choose to live than on the devices we invent. Affecting and engaging, The Heart takes the full measure of the only organ that can move itself.… (more)
User reviews
History and culture imbue the human heart with a great deal of metaphoric and physical significance. To many it embodies the seat of emotion, the core of the soul, and it is the linchpin between life and death. Because of the heart's physical vulnerability, medical treatment was largely unexplored until the end of the 19th century. Dr. Jauhar chronicles the history of experimental and clinical cardiology with details of the (mostly) men who doggedly challenged physiological frontiers, sometimes to the point of their own demise.
The central part of the book looks at the heart as a complex machine, with each chapter focusing on aspects of that machine: as a pump, a generator, wiring, etc. The writing is clear and accessible to a layperson. His goal is to foster understanding in the general public and he does that well. He takes us step wise through the development of the clinical understanding of those aspects of the heart and the treatments derived from that understanding.
Woven through the narrative is the author's family history of heart disease and the impact those events on him and his family. Human emotion and the heart is a secondary theme throughout the book and he ends the book on that chord. After many years of clinical practice during rapid advances in surgical and pharmacological treatment of the heart, the author opines that we are at the point of diminishing returns in those areas. Perhaps the next great advances in the prevention and treatment of heart disease will come from our ability as a species to address the psychological, social, and political roots that lead to promoting the health and well being of our hearts.
Sandeep Jauhar has a close affinity with this organ, not only is he a practising cardiologist, but he only needs to go back to his grandparent's generation to find the roots of his own heart issues. That journey from them to him will take us to the pioneers and mavericks who have discovered so much about it. There is William Harvey who discovered that the blood flowed down the arteries and somehow passed through the flesh and was pumped back up the veins. Inge Edler who made the connection that ultrasound that was being used to find battleships could also be used on the heart to see it working and John Heysham Gibbon who spent thirty years of his life developing a heart and lung machine to oxygenate the blood, opening the doors to being able to perform surgery on the heart without the patient dying. This and many other innovations and groundbreaking advances have lead us to the point where we move ever closer to the artificial heart.
This is a good overview with enough depth in it too for the casual reader of how we have got to where we are now with our understanding and treatment of the heart. There is also Jauhar's personal story of heart disease in his own family and how it impacts his health, but how these diseases have affected all sorts of people from all levels of society.
I am a big fan of the author and his writing, and HEART did not disappoint. There were many facts about the heart (some obscure, some not) interspersed throughout the book to complement patient stories. We read about the author as a young boy and his personal desire
One of the best things about the book is that it’s part history, part medicine, part almost-gory-but-not-overly-done, and part philosophy. Each chapter can stand alone and be read a few days apart without having to remember the plot or which patient he is discussing. Thoughtful illustrations are added to underscore the meaning of the chapters, and footnotes are added to provide explanations or information without slowing down the flow of the narrative. The book strikes a great balance of science and interesting plot without slowing down the narrative with a lot of detail that the average reader without a medical background wouldn’t understand. For someone like me, with a medical background, there were also enough facts to keep me interested. Some books minimize details to make it easy for the reader; Jauhar does not do that. This makes his books fascinating and eminently readable.