The man who touched his own heart : true tales of science, surgery, and mystery / Robert Dunn.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dunn, Rob, author.

Contributor:

Arthur Bernstein Cardiology Library Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Heart--History.

Heart.

Cardiology--History.

Cardiology.

Heart--Diseases--History.

Heart--Surgery--History.

Heart--Diseases.

Heart--Surgery.

History.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

viii, 373 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Little, Brown and Company, 2015.

Summary:

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

The human heart

The bar fight that precipitated the dawn of heart surgery

The Prince of the Heart

When art reinvented science

Blood's orbit

Seeing the thing that eats the heart

The rhythm method

Frankenstein's monsters

Atomic cows

Lighter than a feather

Mending the broken heart

War and fungus

The perfect diet

The beetle and the cigarette

The book of broken hearts

The evolution of broken hearts

Sugarcoating heart disease

Escaping the laws of nature

The future science of the heart.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 331-364) and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Arthur Bernstein Cardiology Library Fund.

ISBN:

0316225797

9780316225793

OCLC:

881140706

Publisher Number:

99961859550