Heart: A History
Rs. 2,490.00
Sandeep Jauhar
- A PBS NEWSHOUR-NEW YORK TIMES BOOK CLUB PICK
- A Mail on Sunday Book of the Year
- A Science Friday Best Science Book of 2018
- A Los Angeles Public Library Best Nonfiction Book of 2018
- Shortlisted for the 2019 Wellcome Book Prize
“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. His latest book, “Heart: A History,” is something of a “Paradiso,” pointing to the field’s brightest and noblest stars while recognizing just how much darkness is still left in the firmament . . . Poignant and chattily erudite.” ―Laura Kolbe, The Wall Street Journal
“Sandeep Jauhar, a New York cardiologist and the author of two medical memoirs, has written a book of unusual depth and richness about a subject that concerns us all . . . Heart: A History is elegantly conceived and still more elegantly executed, with a narrative that flits effortlessly between medieval Persia and contemporary America, medical scholarship and personal anecdote . . . Jauhar writes with a vital, pulsating energy.” ―Thomas Morris, The Times Literary Supplement
“[Sandeep Jauhar’s] gripping new book, Heart a History, had me nearly as enthralled with this pulsating body part as [Jauhar] seems to be. The tone―a physician excited about his specialty―takes a sharp turn from his first two memoirs . . . Jauhar hooks the reader of Heart from the first few pages.” ―Randi Hutter Epstein, The New York Times Book Review
“This is both a history of surgical interventions to heal the heart, and a personal meditation on illness, family, loss, and living. [Jauhar], who has lost several family members to heart disease, takes time to examine both the work of doctors trying to fix hearts and the lives of people living with heart disease, for a book that is touching and ultimately, hopeful.” ―Los Angeles Public Library, “Best of 2018”
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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.
- Hardcover : 288 pages
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