His gripping new book, Heart: A History, had me nearly as enthralled with this pulsating body part as he seems to be. The tone — a physician excited about his specialty — takes a sharp turn from his first two memoirs ... Jauhar hooks the reader of Heart in the first few pages by describing his own health scare — an exam showed obstruction in the main artery feeding his heart ... Most chapters launch with a riveting scene: a patient in the thick of getting a heart transplant, say, or having open-heart surgery. You feel as if you’re watching an episode of a medical television drama ... strange and captivating ... Fun facts are sprinkled throughout ... Heart is chock-full of absorbing tales that infuse fresh air into a topic that is often relegated to textbooks or metaphors about pumps, plumbing or love.
Jauhar’s point is deceptively simple: the heart may function biologically as a pump, but it is never free of representational overlays; its very physiology is a kind of written record of our emotional life. From heart rate and blood pressure to arrhythmias and myocardial tissue damage, Jauhar writes, the biological heart is extremely sensitive to the metaphorical one ... Jauhar invites the reader into the resonant chambers of his heart, narrating the history of an organ while also offering a stirring personal tour of his sorrows.
His latest book is something of a 'Paradiso,' pointing to the field’s brightest and noblest stars while recognizing just how much darkness is still left in the firmament ... Poignant and chattily erudite, Heart shuttles between scholarship and memoir to relate this continuing epic, the uneasy companionship between humans and our most metaphorized organ ... Where Heart shines is in charting another crucial shift that sounds like a throwback but might well be cardiology’s next wave: attending to the mind-body problem.
In these first scenes, Jauhar, who directs the heart failure program at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, sets a tone at once intimate and detached. And over the ensuing pages, he is our trusty guide through a compelling story about what makes each and every one of us tick. Both primer and ode, Heart is a fascinating education for those of us who harbor this most hallowed organ but know little about it ... Ever the fluid writer, Jauhar even employs the metaphorical heart to describe what it took to face the devastated parents of a young patient who had just died: 'Once, it was difficult to witness the grief of loved ones. But my heart had been hardened.'
... beautifully written, informative, and thought-provoking ... a work of both medical history and medical philosophy, one which invites us to look deeply not just at one organ system or category of disease but more broadly at the relationship of mind to body and art to science ... Jauhar is a gifted storyteller who paints portraits deftly and with few words. He is a master of the verbal miniature ... Jauhar does not delve into the long and damaging history of gender bias in heart disease diagnosis, treatment, and research, a lacuna in this otherwise comprehensive book ... Jauhar’s engaging prose makes us as happy to spend time with him, his patients, and his family as we are to read about William Harvey or heart transplant pioneer Christiaan Barnard.
Jauhar's writing style reads like a Arthur Hailey manuscript, engaging the reader with ease and keeping you hooked with interesting personal anecdotes, historical nuggets, factual nuggets, humorously-narrated tales of torturous perseverance and recounting how some of the most important inventions related to treatment of cardiovascular diseases, were, in fact, stumbled upon by accident.
Heart is a fascinating exploration into the roots of early medicine and cardiology, which is weaved in throughout its three parts: the heart as a metaphor—pointing to its use primarily in literature; machine, as in its physiology; and mystery, as in what scientists and doctors don’t yet understand about diseases of the heart and current paradigm shifts around treatment ... But notably, almost all of those highlighted are male researchers and physicians. No mention was given to Dr. Myra Logan, who became the first female cardiac surgeon; Dr. Maude Abbott, who invented an international classification system for congenital heart disease; or Dr. Helen Taussig ... Where the book really shines, however, is Jauhar’s weaving of a tender personal narrative.
...sharp, engrossing ... an artful blend of the historical and the personal ... Jauhar is particularly comfortable describing these miraculous inventions, their evolution and exactly how they operate. At the same time he sews his family into the picture, including himself ... Jauhar was wise to partition his book into metaphor and mystery, for stress, the great bogeyman of the final pages—from the romantic breakup, depression, social disconnectivity, to the boss yelling at you, the drive to work, to the eighth cup of coffee to keep awake to do yet more work—and the general lack of down time is breaking our hearts in more ways than one.
As he tells the story of the heart with special emphasis on the past 100 years, when the majority of our advances have occurred, he pulls out interesting characters and vignettes which make the story far more interesting than simply recounting facts. Of course, the story is also inherently interesting because it is more directly connected to human mortality than just about anything else. ... For a nonfiction book, I found this to be an easy and enjoyable read. It is not as long or daunting as other similar medical nonfiction (The Emperor of all Maladies, for example), nor is it dry; the writing is clear and captivating.
A string of colorfully graphic anecdotes involving skewered and bleeding patients demonstrates how much daring physicians learned about the heart by confronting trauma with ingenuity, from German surgeon Ludwig Rehn, who verified the feasibility of cardiac repair in 1897, to William Greatbatch, an inventor who created the perfect lithium battery to power pacemakers and save millions of lives. Jauhar pairs medical history with revelations of his own family’s tragic encounters with heart disease, delivering a deftly written and heartfelt (literally) contemplation of our most precious and often-misunderstood internal organ.
Jauhar achieves a balanced tone throughout, sharing profound admiration for what can be accomplished by treating the heart as a machine, while also urging the reader, and the medical community, not to undervalue of the significance of the 'emotional heart' ... Throughout, Jauhar is thoughtful, self-reflective, and profoundly respectful of doctors and patients alike; readers will respond by opening their own hearts a little bit, to both grief and wonder.
Readers’ jaws will drop and drop again at stories of daring researchers experimenting on themselves and pioneering surgeons leaving a trail of dead patients, many of them children, as they perfected machines, devices, and techniques that often work miracles, fixing fatally malformed hearts, correcting defects, and, when they succeed, extending lives ... Another in the everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about genre, but a superior example.
