The Heart Healers: The Misfits, Mavericks, and Rebels Who Created the Greatest Medical Breakthrough of Our Lives MP3 CD – Audiobook, MP3 Audio, Unabridged
Author: James Forrester M.D. ID: 1494558645
Review
“It’s a book of marvels.” —Publishers Weekly Starred Review
About the Author
James Forrester, MD, is a world-renowned cardiac surgeon and the former chief of the Division of Cardiology at Cedars-Sinai. In addition, he is a professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. James lives in Malibu, California, with his wife.
Jonathan Yen was inspired by the Golden Age of Radio, and while the gold was gone by the time he got there, he’s carried that inspiration through to commercial work, voice acting, and stage productions. From vintage Howard Fast science fiction to naturalist Paul Rosolie’s true adventures in the , Jonathan loves to tell a good story.
MP3 CDPublisher: Tantor Audio; MP3 – Unabridged CD edition (September 29, 2015)Language: EnglishISBN-10: 1494558645ISBN-13: 978-1494558642 Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.6 x 7.4 inches Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies) Best Sellers Rank: #1,883,378 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #1745 in Books > Medical Books > Medicine > Internal Medicine > Pathology > Diseases > Cardiovascular #1922 in Books > Medical Books > Medicine > Internal Medicine > Cardiology #2283 in Books > Books on CD > Nonfiction
This may be classified as a medical book, but James Forrester knows how to tell a great story. This is a combination of memoir as he interns as a cardiologist to the history of cardio diseases and how they were treated in the past through the present.
He writes about the pioneers in the field of heart surgery and heart treatments, describes machinery and how they operate, all using laymen’s terms that are understandable and fascinating to most people. In short, he makes the field of cardio-vascular disease and cardio injuries and their many treatment methods interesting by also giving kudos to the many unknown scientists and doctors who were mavericks, misfits and risk-takers: Dwight Harken (a WWII chief of thoracic surgery who was put in charge of treating battle-wounded soldiers), Harken’s peer and rival Charles Bailey, Mason Sones, Rene Favaloro, Akira Endo to name a few. All of them had one characteristic in common: they were self-confident and were great in their fields. They also took risks that sometimes meant the death of the patient and the potential loss of their medical licenses.
He also tells the stories of some of the brave patients. Not all lived, some knew full well the risk of volunteering to new surgeries and techniques and yet all of them are presented as very humane, compassionate people willing to help the medical field. All the patients in the book have unique symptoms to various kinds of coronary artery disease (CAD), heart defects or traumatic injuries to the heart, all which just a few decades ago were a sure sign of death.
This book is fascinating to read not only because it is well-written, it’s also well organized into four distinctive parts.
To someone born in the last twenty or or thirty years, the idea of transplanting the human heart (or any organ other than the brain, for that matter) is not particularly exciting. Today, over 3,500 human heart transplants are done annually, with over 90% of the recipients living over a year after surgery. The reader probably knows someone who has had one. But human heart transplants are a relatively recent phenomenon; the first successful one was done in 1967, and those of us old enough to remember can still recall what an astounding piece of news it was. I was a small child at the time, and I can still recall the name of the surgeon who performed it, Christiaan Barnard.
Even more so than the brain, the human heart has always been the most challenging organ for the medical profession. Our Neolithic ancestors were operating, albeing crudely, to relieve fluid pressure on the brain resulting fro injury, but Artistorle wRned that "the heart alone, of all viscera, cannot withstand injury." It was long thought to be untouchable by surgeons- how could you do surgery on an organ that was continually in motion? And then, in 1896, a bold senior German surgeon by the name of Ludwig Rehnquist did the unthinkable: He repaired a knife wound in a beating heart. He wrote up his experiment,mexplaining to the medical community how one might staunch the bleeding from a small wound with ordinary finger pressure, and then apply sutures between beats of the heart. It took a heroic amount of self-confidence- some might say ego- to do what Rehn did, and what Barnard would later do, but the history of heart surgery (and surgery in general) is full of such men and women. Surgeons have a reputation for ego, even among other doctors, and it’s easy to understand why.
When I saw the size of this book, I almost had a heart attack! (Or, rather, a myocardial infarction, if you want to get technical.) And James Forrester, M.D., does get technical in this book. But don’t worry, he’s a skilled writer, so you coast along with him as he wends his way from the pioneer days of heart surgery to the present, examining the advancements made one by one, as surgeons both brilliant and eccentric built on the discoveries of the surgeons that came before them.
Dr. Forrester tells the story of how the miracle surgeries of today got their start in the labs and operating rooms of doctors who were brave enough to think outside the box and make connections previously unmade. "Revolutions occur when happenstance opens the door just a crack, and a unique individual standing at the door glimpses a shimmering possibility that the rest of humanity has missed," he writes.
Those standing at the door include Dr. Dwight Harken, who first dared to operate during World War II on the heart, an organ previously thought to be untouchable, by devising a way to remove shrapnel. Drs. John Gibbon and Clarence Dennis teamed up with IBM to come up with a heart-lung machine. Dr. Charles Dotter and Dr. Mason Sones discovered a way to look at the inside of coronary arteries and see heart disease in the making.
But the book is not all roses and rainbows. The practice of medicine, Dr. Forrester says, is often a matter of trial and error. "In medicine," he says, "we learn more from our mistakes than from our successes. Error exposes truth." The errors he recounts shine a light on the horrors of a death on the operating table, a life cut short, children left motherless, hearts that are "too good to die," as Dr.
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