Heart Healers

From a renowned surgeon, “a stunning survey of cardiology’s ‘Golden Age’ and the ‘misfits’ who made it so . . . a book of marvels” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

By the middle of the twentieth century, heart disease was killing millions and, as with the Black Death centuries before, physicians stood helpless. Visionaries, though, had begun to make strides decades earlier, daring to defy the medical wisdom of their day.

On Sept. 7, 1895, Ludwig Rehn successfully sutured the heart of a living man with a knife wound to the chest for the first time. Once it was deemed possible to perform surgery on the heart, others followed. In 1929, Dr. Werner Forssman inserted a cardiac catheter in his own arm and forced the x-ray technician on duty to take a photo as he successfully threaded it down the vein into his own heart . . . and lived. On June 6, 1944—D-Day—another momentous event occurred far from the Normandy beaches: Dr. Dwight Harken sutured the shrapnel-injured heart of a young soldier, saving his life, and the term “cardiac surgeon” born.

In The Heart Healers, world-renowned cardiac surgeon Dr. James Forrester tells the story of these rebels and the risks they took with their own lives and the lives of others to heal the most elemental of human organs. The result is a compelling chronicle of a disease and its cure, a disease that is still with us—but that is slowly being conquered by healers.

“Forrester brings history to life and explains complex procedures for lay readers in this excellent book.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“One of the great medical storytellers of our era.” —Eric Topol, cardiologist and author of Deep Medicine