The Heart Healers

(Paperback, Paperback)

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The Heart Healers is the compelling story of how scientists and doctors learned to save the human heart, told by one of the men who made it possible.Heart disease was once a death sentence. In The Heart Healers, world renowned cardiac surgeon Dr James Forrester tells the story of the mavericks and rebels who defied accumulated medical wisdom to begin conquering it. In 1895, Ludwig Rehn successfully sutured the heart of a living man suffering from a knife wound, and heart surgery was suddenly possible. In 1929, Dr Werner Forssmann inserted a cardiac catheter in his own arm and forced the X-ray technician to take a photo as Forssmann successfully threaded it down the vein into his own heart ...and lived. On D-day in 1944, Dr Dwight Harken sutured the shrapnel-injured heart of a young soldier and saved his life, and the term 'cardiac surgeon' was born. Dr Forrester tells the story of these rebels, and the risks they took with their own lives and the lives of others to heal the most elemental of human organs. The result is a compelling chronicle of a disease and its cure, a disease that is still with us, but one that is slowly being worn away by 'The Heart Healers'.