The Man Who Touched His Own Heart
True Tales of Science, Surgery, and Mystery
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
The secret history of our most vital organ: the human heart.
The Man Who Touched His Own Heart tells the raucous, gory, mesmerizing story of the heart, from the first "explorers" who dug up cadavers and plumbed their hearts' chambers, through the first heart surgeries -- which had to be completed in three minutes before death arrived -- to heart transplants and the latest medical efforts to prolong our hearts' lives, almost defying nature in the process.
Thought of as the seat of our soul, then as a mysteriously animated object, the heart is still more a mystery than it is understood. Why do most animals only get one billion beats? (And how did modern humans get to over two billion, effectively letting us live out two lives?) Why are sufferers of gingivitis more likely to have heart attacks? Why do we often undergo expensive procedures when cheaper ones are just as effective? What do Da Vinci, Mary Shelley, and contemporary Egyptian archaeologists have in common? And what does it really feel like to touch your own heart, or to have someone else's beating inside your chest? Rob Dunn's fascinating history of our hearts brings us deep inside the science, history, and stories of the four chambers we depend on most.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this entertaining history of cardiac research and treatment, Dunn (The Wild Life of Our Bodies), a science writer and North Carolina State University associate professor, explores the heart's strengths and weaknesses through profiles of the notable scientists, artists, researchers, inventors, and doctors who wrestled with its mysteries. The book opens with Daniel Williams, a Chicago doctor who performed the first cardiac surgery when he operated on a bar-brawl victim in 1893. From there he offers an expansive survey of "ambitious individuals who believed they could conquer our most tempestuous organ in new ways, and of patients... who lived or did not as a consequence." He includes the ancient Greek physician Galen, "the most important medical scientist in history," whose care of battered Roman gladiators and theories on blood circulation guided doctors for centuries; Leonardo da Vinci, whose insights on circulation and heart-valve function were ahead of their time; and the adventurous Werner Forssmann, a Pulitzer Prize winning doctor who touched his own heart and revealed its inner workings by injecting dye into one of his veins. Dunn also covers advances such as bypass surgery, angioplasty, and heart-related pharmaceuticals in this eloquent appraisal of the feats that have given humans "a billion and half heartbeats with which to do as we please."
