While I didn’t enjoy this quite as much as two other heart-themed memoirs I’ve read, The Sanctuary of Illness by Thomas Larson and Echoes of Heartsounds by Martha Weinman Lear, I still think it’s a strong contender for next year’s Wellcome Book Prize (the judging panel is announced tomorrow!). In terms of readalikes, I’d mention Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Gene, in which the personal story also takes something of a backseat to the science, and Gavin Francis’s Shapeshifters, which exhibits a similar interest in the metaphors applied to the body. Perhaps I would prefer Jauhar’s first book, Intern: A Doctor’s Initiation. Maybe I’ve read too much surgical history this year ( The Butchering Art by Lindsey Fitzharris and Face to Face by Jim McCaul), though, because I found myself growing fairly impatient with the medical details in the long Part II, which centers on the heart as a machine, and was drawn more to the autobiographical material in the first and final sections. I also particularly liked his account of being called out of bed to perform an echocardiogram, which required catching a taxi at 3 a.m. My favorite chapter was the twelfth, “Vulnerable Heart,” which is about how trauma can cause heart arrhythmias it opens with an account of the author’s days cataloguing body parts in a makeshift morgue as a 9/11 first responder. These include the heart–lung machine, cardiac catheterization, heart transplantation, and artificial hearts.Īlong the timeline, Jauhar peppers in bits of his own professional and academic experience, like experimenting on frogs during high school in California and meeting his first cadaver at medical school.

However, the key is that fewer people will now die of heart disease thanks to the developments of the last six decades in particular. Things had really gotten personal.Ĭardiovascular disease has been the #1 killer in the West since 1910 and, thanks to steady smoking rates and a continuing rise in obesity and sedentary lifestyles, will still affect 60% of Americans. As the book opens, Jauhar was shocked to learn he had up to a 50% blockage of his own coronary vessels.

His family history – both grandfathers died of sudden cardiac events in India, one after being bitten by a snake – prompted an obsession with the heart, and he and his brother both became cardiologists. Sandeep Jauhar is the director of the Heart Failure Program at Long Island Medical Center. There could hardly be an author better qualified to deliver this thorough history of the heart and the treatment of its problems.

Sandeep jauhar books