Heart: A History: Shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize 2019

By Sandeep Jauhar

‘Jauhar weaves his own personal and family story into his history of the heart…very effectively… This gives a certain dramatic tension to the book, as it tells the fascinating and rather wonderful history of cardiology.’

–Henry Marsh, New Statesman

A Mail on Sunday Book of the Year

The heart lies at the centre of life. For cardiologist Sandeep Jauhar it is an obsession.

In this fascinating history he interweaves gripping scenes from the operating theatre with the moving tale of his family’s history of heart problems – from the death of his grandfather to the ominous signs of how he himself might die.

Jauhar looks at the pioneers who risked patients’ lives and their own careers, and confronts the limits of medical technology, arguing that how we live is more important than any device or drug we may invent. Heart is the all-encompassing story of the engine of life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Release date: Sep 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9781786072962

Sandeep Jauhar

Sandeep Jauhar is the bestselling author of several acclaimed books on medical topics: Intern, Doctored, and Heart: A History, which was named a best book of 2018 by The Mail on Sunday, Science Friday, and the Los Angeles Public Library, and was a PBS NewsHour/New York Times book club pick; it was also a finalist for the 2019 Wellcome Book Prize. A practicing physician, Jauhar writes regularly for the opinion section of The New York Times. His TED Talk on the emotional heart was one of the ten most-watched TED Talks of 2019.

Reviews for Heart

[pdcread · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

If there is one thing that you need more than your brain, then it is your heart. Over the course of a normal life, the heart will beat around 115,00 times a day which equates to 42 million times a year. Over your lifetime it will pump a staggering 158 million litres of blood. For years was seen as the centre of our soul too, but that attitude changed with the rise of scientific understanding of the way it worked. But what goes around comes around and modern research has shown how the heart can react and change shape as it reacts to feeling and trauma. It is the organ that is the very centre and essence of us.

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.

[mm_jones · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Fascinating history of the heart in culture and medicine. Dr. Jauhar personalizes the advances in cardiology and explains the limits of technology.

[tangledthread · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Sandeep Jauhar has been fascinated by the heart since he was a small boy. Lucky for him that he has been able to pursue a career as a highly trained cardiologist. And lucky for us that he is able to write. This book is a relatively small volume and the writing begins rather simply. As the book progresses he subtly introduces more complex, thought provoking ideas.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.