His most recent book, Heart: A History, tells the little-known stories of the doctors who risked their careers - and the patients who risked their lives - to understand our most vital organ. In addition to his medical practice, Jauhar is a New York Times best-selling author and currently a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times.

Sandeep Jauhar is a practicing cardiologist and the Director of the Heart Failure Program at Northwell Health's Long Island Jewish Medical Center. 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.Īffecting, engaging, and beautifully written, Heart: A History takes the full measure of the only organ that can move itself.Part 1 of TED Radio Hour episode: HeartacheĬardiologist Sandeep Jauhar explains a case where deep grief caused takotsubo cardiomyopathy-also called 'broken heart syndrome.' He examines the connection emotions have with our most vital organ. 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. And we encounter Wilson Greatbatch, who saved millions by inventing the pacemaker?by accident. Walton Lillehei, who connected a patient's circulatory system to a healthy donor's, paving the way for the heart-lung machine. He introduces us to Daniel Hale Williams, the African American doctor who performed the world's first open heart surgery in Gilded Age Chicago.

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.ĭeftly alternating between key historical episodes and his own work, combining his family's own moving history of heart disease with gripping scenes from the operating theatre, Jauhar tells the colourful 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. It's so bound up in our deepest feelings that it can physically change shape when we experience emotional trauma.įor 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. The spark of life, fount of emotion, house of the soul-the heart lies at the centre of every facet of our existence.

Heart by Sandeep Jauhar