Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* These true stories about the heart pulsate with information and intrigue. Meshing medical history, biography, physiology, and evolutionary science, biologist Dunn scrutinizes a living pump that is simultaneously strong and vulnerable. He writes about the many ways the organ is damaged and the treatments that keep it ticking. Readers learn about the self-experimenter who catheterized his own heart, the researcher who discovered the first statin drug to lower cholesterol, and the inventor of the cardiac pacemaker device. The development of the heart-lung machine, coronary artery bypass surgery, heart transplants, stents, and the artificial heart is reviewed. Tantalizing topics include the link between our hypervigilant immune system and the development of atherosclerosis, and the complicated relationship of diet to cardiac disease. Dunn suggests that contemporary heart disease is the result of living long lives in bodies built for shorter ones. The average life expectancy of most species amounts to one billion heartbeats, but human beings in developed countries get about 2.5 billion beats. The bonus beats accrue from advances in public health and medical breakthroughs. Astonishingly, the modern human heart appears to labor enough for two lifetimes.--Miksanek, Tony Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this entertaining history of cardiac research and treatment, Dunn (The Wild Life of Our Bodies), a science writer and North Carolina State University associate professor, explores the heart's strengths and weaknesses through profiles of the notable scientists, artists, researchers, inventors, and doctors who wrestled with its mysteries. The book opens with Daniel Williams, a Chicago doctor who performed the first cardiac surgery when he operated on a bar-brawl victim in 1893. From there he offers an expansive survey of "ambitious individuals who believed they could conquer our most tempestuous organ in new ways, and of patients... who lived or did not as a consequence." He includes the ancient Greek physician Galen, "the most important medical scientist in history," whose care of battered Roman gladiators and theories on blood circulation guided doctors for centuries; Leonardo da Vinci, whose insights on circulation and heart-valve function were ahead of their time; and the adventurous Werner Forssmann, a Pulitzer Prize-winning doctor who touched his own heart and revealed its inner workings by injecting dye into one of his veins. Dunn also covers advances such as bypass surgery, angioplasty, and heart-related pharmaceuticals in this eloquent appraisal of the feats that have given humans "a billion and half heartbeats with which to do as we please." (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Violating every reasonable rule of research, in 1929 Werner Forssmann inserted a urethral catheter into his arm and guided it to the right atrium of his heart, injecting dye for an X-ray. In the process, he stunted his career but also ultimately won a Nobel Prize. Dunn (ecology and evolution, North Carolina State Univ.; The Wild Life of Our Bodies) relates Forssmann's story along with many others often as unusual as he looks at the history of science's relationship with the human heart. Covering from Greek physician Galen in the second century CE to the leading edge of research today, the author focuses on individuals who built upon one another's work to expand our knowledge of anatomy, physiology, disease, diagnosis, and the many forms of treatment and prevention now in place. He also describes how the human heart and its maladies fit in the evolutionary tree, and the importance of interactions with the environment. VERDICT By illuminating the contributions of fascinating people who played vital but not always well-known roles in our understanding of the human heart, Dunn offers an unusual and enjoyable survey and update.-Richard Maxwell, Porter Adventist Hosp. Lib., Denver (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The heart was a black box up until a century ago, writes Dunn (Ecology and Evolution/North Carolina State Univ.; The Wild Life on Our Bodies, 2011, etc.). His well-researched text chronicles how the box was opened.The author opens with an account of how, even with today's impressive technology and medicine, his mother nearly died from too high a dosage of digitalis, a drug used to slow a rapid heartbeat. The author then recounts an incident in 1893 in which an African-American doctor in Chicago saved the life of a victim of a stab wound to the heart by cutting into the wound and sewing a tear in the pericardium. Then it's on to ancient history, with nods to da Vinci, Harvey and some others as exceptions to the view of the heart as sacrosanct and inviolable. The modern era began with the derring-do of the titular doctor, Werner Forssmann, who in 1929 inserted a catheter into an arm vein, threaded it to the heart and had it X-rayed, performing the first angiogram. In the 1930s, there were significant improvements in angiography, and succeeding decades saw the advent of heart-lung machines, new diets, drugs and devices (pacemakers, stents), and heart transplants. Dunn profiles the principals, with particular opprobrium for Christiaan Barnard, the South African surgeon ruthless in his zeal to be first to perform a human-to-human heart transplant. As for treatments today, Dunn cites studies showing that patients fare better with medication and diet to treat narrowed arteries, as compared with stents, but the latter are a huge moneymaker for hospitals. Finally, speaking as an evolutionary biologist, the author urges scientists to study the heart in evolution, pointing to striking findings that humans are alone among primates in our suffering from atherosclerosis. It's complicated, he writes, but we might reap huge benefits in prevention rather than just focusing on repairs. Credit Dunn with a valuable text that offers something for everyonepatients, practitioners, medical students, historians and policymakers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
