Sandeep Jauhar

‘Jauhar weaves his own personal and family story into his history of the heart…very effectively… This gives a certain dramatic tension to the book, as it tells the fascinating and rather wonderful history of cardiology.’ –Henry Marsh, New Statesman A Mail on Sunday Book of the Year The heart lies at the centre of life. For cardiologist Sandeep Jauhar it is an obsession. In this fascinating history he interweaves gripping scenes from the operating theatre with the moving tale of his family’s history of heart problems – from the death of his grandfather to the ominous signs of how he himself might die. Jauhar looks at the pioneers who risked patients’ lives and their own careers, and confronts the limits of medical technology, arguing that how we live is more important than any device or drug we may invent. Heart is the all-encompassing story of the engine of life.

Shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize 2019

Heart: A History

Jiya

I was fascinated by the heart's dichotomous nature: muscular, constantly toiling and yet so vulnerable at the same time. 

But the life it sustains can quickly be taken away. When the heart stops, death is instantaneous. 

If life is a continuous struggle against the inexorable march of entropy, then the heartbeat is at the core of that conflict.

In relation to how our century will go down historically as one that overpowers the cardiovascular disease and finally being in control of it but this success in healthcare still results with cope rather than cure

Patients who once might have died of heart disease must now live with it, though often in an enervated state, a fraction of their former selves. 

The twelfth-century Christian mystic Hildegard of Bingen once wrote, "The soul sits at the center of the heart, as though in a house." In many ways, the heart does resemble a house. It is divided into multiple chambers, separated by doors. The walls have a characteristic texture. The house is old, designed over many millennia. Hidden from view are the wires and pipes that keep it functioning. And though the house has no intrinsic meaning, it carries meaning because of the meanings we attribute to it. The heart was once considered the center of human action and thought-the source of courage, desire, ambition, and love. Even if those connotations are outdated, they are still deeply relevant to how we think about this organ and how it shapes our lives.

Shakespeare refers to another conception of the heart: as the locus of romantic love. "I made these wars for Egypt and the Queen," Antony declares, "whose heart I thought I had, for she had mine."

This association between the heart and different types of love has withstood modernity. When Barney Clark, a retired dentist with end-stage heart failure, received the first permanent artificial heart in Salt Lake City, Utah, on December 1, 1982, his wife of thirty-nine years asked the doctors, "Will he still be able to love me?"

Cassandra Tang

It was a fascinating exercise, a reminder to us aspiring doctors that even as we tried to figure out how our cadavers died, we should not forget to think about how they might have lived.

To treat our hearts, we must repair our societies and minds. We must look at not only our bodies but also ourselves. 

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