Affecting, engaging, and beautifully written, Heart: A History takes the full measure of the only organ that can move itself.'Blending the humor, compassion, and absorbing family drama of first-rate memoir with expert science writing, has composed a can’t-miss introduction to what has been called The Age of Alzheimer’s.' -Sanjay Gupta, author of Keep Sharp and World War CA deeply affecting memoir of a father's descent into dementia, and a revelatory inquiry into why the human brain degenerates with age and what we can do about it.Almost six million Americans-about one in every ten people over the age of sixty-five-have Alzheimer’s disease or related dementias, and this number is projected to more than double by 2050.

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.

Sandeep jauhar books