(by Sandeep Jauhar)
I don’t normally gravitate to books about medicine/medical history, but someone chose this for nonfiction book club and I enjoyed it. Jauhar walks readers through the history of human understanding of/theories of the heart and circulatory system and various heart-related medical advances, while also telling the story of his own relationship with the heart, both as a doctor and as a patient/potential patient (he’s a cardiologist with a family history of heart attacks). I knew basically nothing about the history of cardiac surgery before reading this book, and it was interesting to read about early open-heart surgeries in the 1890s, the development of the heart-lung machine in the twentieth century, and other advances including the use of cardiac catheterization and the development of procedures like balloon angioplasty and devices like coronary stents, implantable pacemakers, and implantable defibrillators. The book also explores risk factors for heart disease, including “psychosocial factors,” and makes the point that “chronic diseases […] are inextricably linked to the state of our neighborhoods, jobs, families, and minds,” so if we want to improve cardiac mortality rates, we need to improve the state of all those things.
I found the writing style of this book to be clear and pretty approachable for someone without a scientific/medical background; my one complaint was that some of the more personal sections sometimes felt like they were trying too hard to be writerly, like when a winter scene is described like this: “Tree boughs speckled white split like dendrites onto the gray sky.” I did find the personal sections interesting and sometimes moving, though—particularly the section about Jauhar’s experience near Ground Zero after 9/11 and the chapter about his mother’s death.
Interesting facts/other things I hadn’t known about before:
– Leonardo da Vinci made “glass models of the aorta and the aortic valve to investigate the dynamics of blood flow using dyed water.”
– Before the creation of the heart-lung machine (which keeps oxygenated blood flowing to the brain and other organs during heart surgery) the options available to avoid brain and organ damage were a) surgical hypothermia – which worked but only gave doctors a short window for operations and b) cross-circulation – which involved hooking a patient and a donor (generally a parent) together with beer tubes and milk pumps so that the donor’s circulatory system would support both patient and donor for the duration of the surgery.
– People with implantable defibrillators can have very different experiences. Some don’t get shocked very often, while others get shocked a huge amount of times; some don’t find the shocks to be a big deal, while others find them very painful and traumatic. I had no idea about any of this, and didn’t realize that people with implantable defibrillators sometimes end up getting them adjusted to be less sensitive.
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