The bestselling author of Intern and Doctored tells the story of the thing that makes us tick For 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. 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. Deftly 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. He introduces us to Daniel Hale Williams, the African American doctor who performed the world’s first open heart surgery in Gilded Age Chicago. We meet C. Walton Lillehei, who connected a patient’s circulatory system to a healthy donor’s, paving the way for the heart-lung machine. And we encounter Wilson Greatbatch, who saved millions by inventing the pacemaker—by accident. 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. 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. Affecting, engaging, and beautifully written, Heart: A History takes the full measure of the only organ that can move itself.

The heart has consistently captured the human imagination. It has been singled out as a cultural icon, the repository of our deepest religious and artistic impulses, the organ whose steady functioning is understood, both literally and symbolically, as the very life force itself. The Sublime Engine will explore the profound sense of awe every person feels when they ponder the miracle encased within their ribs. In this lyrical history of our most essential organ, a critically-acclaimed novelist and a leading cardiologist--who happen to be brothers--draw upon history, science, religion, popular culture, and literature to illuminate all of the heart's physical and figurative chambers. Each of the four sections-- The Ancient Heart, The Renaissance Heart, The Modern Heart, and The Future Heart--will focus on a major epoch in our understanding of the heart and the hidden history of cardiology. Erudite, witty, and enthralling, The Sublime Engine makes the heart come alive for readers.

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.

The dramatic race to transplant the first human heart spanned two years, three continents and five cities against a backdrop of searing tension, scientific brilliance, ethical controversy, racial strife and emotional turmoil. It culminated in a terrifying moment in the early hours of 3 December 1967 when, in a cramped operating theatre in a Cape Town hospital, Professor Chris Barnard stared into an empty cavity from which he had just removed a heart. He knew that he had only minutes left to make history and save the life of a 55-year-old man by filling the gaping hole in his chest with a heart which had just been beating inside a 25-year-old woman. Every Second Countsis the story of this gripping race to conquer the greatest of medical challenges. It also reveals the truth about the man at the centre of it all, whose turbulent life story was just as gripping. The kind of true story that would be dismissed as far-fetched if presented as fiction, it combines an utterly compelling portrait of cutting-edge science with raw human drama, and shows how the course of medicine itself was changed for ever.

'Thrilling... The “dizzying” story of heart surgery is every bit as important as that of the nuclear, computer or rocket ages. And now it has been given the history it deserves' James McConnachie, Sunday Times For thousands of years the human heart remained the deepest of mysteries; both home to the soul and an organ too complex to touch, let alone operate on. Then, in the late nineteenth century, medics began going where no one had dared go before. In eleven landmark operations, Thomas Morris tells us stories of triumph, reckless bravery, swaggering arrogance, jealousy and rivalry, and incredible ingenuity, from the trail-blazing ‘blue baby’ procedure to the first human heart transplant. The Matter of the Heart gives us a view over the surgeon’s shoulder, showing us the heart’s inner workings and failings. It describes both a human story and a history of risk-taking that has ultimately saved millions of lives.

"Josef Pieper's account of the centrality and meaning of the virtues is a needed primer to teach us exactly the meaning and relationship of the virtues and how they relate to the faith and its own special virtues. Pieper's attention is ever to the particular virtue, its precise meaning, and to its contribution to the wholeness that constituted an ordered, active, and truthful human life. No better brief account of the virtues can be found. Pieper has long instructed us in these realities that need to be made operative in each life as it touches all else 'that is', as Pieper himself often puts it." — James V. Schall, S.J., Georgetown University "A fine and thought provoking examination of the relationship between the mind, heart, and moral life of the human person." — John Cardinal O'Connor, Archbishop of New York "Pieper's sentences are admirably constructed and his ideas are expressed with maximum clarity. He restores to philosophy what common sense obstinately tells us ought to be found there: wisdom and insight." — T. S. Eliot