The Heart Healers: The Misfits, Mavericks, and Rebels Who Created the Greatest Medical Breakthrough of Our Lives

by James S. Forrester

At one time, heart disease was a death sentence. In The Heart Healers, world renowned cardiologist Dr. James Forrester tells the story of the mavericks and rebels who defied the accumulated medical wisdom of the day to begin conquering heart disease. By the middle of the 20th century, heart disease was killing millions and, as with the Black Death centuries before, physicians stood helpless. Visionaries, though, had begun to make strides earlier. On Sept. 7, 1895, Ludwig Rehn successfully sutured the heart of a living man with a knife wound to the chest for the first time. Once it was deemed possible to perform surgery on the heart, others followed. In 1929, Dr. Werner Forssman inserted a cardiac catheter in his own arm and forced the x-ray technician on duty to take a photo as he successfully threaded it down the vein into his own heart...and lived. On June 6, 1944 - D-Day - another momentous event occurred far from the Normandy beaches: Dr. Dwight Harken sutured the shrapnel-injured heart of a young soldier, saved his life and the term "cardiac surgeon" 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 heart. 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".

Genres: Medicine, Science, History, Nonfiction, Medical, Health, Health Care

416 pages, Paperback

First published June 9, 2015

About the author

James S. Forrester, MD, is the George Burns and Gracie Allen Emeritus Professor of Cardiology, former Chief of Cardiology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center Los Angeles, and Professor of Medicine at the UCLA School of Medicine. Early in his career he developed a bedside way of treating heart attack patients, called the Forrester classification, which revolutionized the care of critically ill patients. Later he developed an approach to diagnostic heart tests, called the Diamond-Forrester method, which is used worldwide in cardiology. He has served as mentor to several hundred cardiologists, a number of whom became international leaders in heart disease. He has published over 400 full-length scientific manuscripts, been an invited visiting professor at many of the nation's leading medical universities, and given a thousand national and international cardiovascular lectures. He is the second-ever recipient of the 40,000 member American College of Cardiology's Lifetime Achievement Award, its highest honor. In 2013 his former mentees posted a video tribute on YouTube.

Reviews

[Amber · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes... the ones who see things differently -- they're not fond of rules... You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things... they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do." - Steve Jobs

Dr. Forrester quoted Steve Jobs in the book and I felt that it summed it up perfectly.

There are very few things in this world that fascinate me more than the world of cardiology. This was perfection. If you have ANY interest at all in medical science - please read this. It's so beautifully written I struggle to find anything to say besides read it.

"That's the essence of our tale: the past, present, and future of heart disease. But it's the tree without the branches. The beauty, the fascination of our chronicle, as with all stories lies in people: the doctors and the patients who live it.

[Saket Saurabh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Surprised that it's not that popular a title. May be due to pricing or limited availability. Loved it. Fascinating account of how heart focused treatments have progressed over a period of time. Title really apt, story of risk takers who bet their career to advance their careers.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a cool book. You don’t have to work in medicine to appreciate it. But I do, and I did. So much.

[Elizabeth S · Rating 3 out of 5]

The pros:

Fascinating and inspiring subject. Forrester is a gifted storyteller and obviously knows his field extremely well.

The cons:

Organization was jumpy. A lot of times I wasn't sure what decade we were in. Lots of sidetracks even within sidetracks. One moment we are living a medical procedure moment by moment, then we have a flashback to something Forrester mentioned earlier in the book, then we are off learning the background of how a medical device got its name, then comparing the results to Kirk Gibson in the World Series, etc.

Also, treatment was uneven. Some medical researchers/surgeons had pages of biographical material, some were a short paragraph.

Overall, a very interesting read.

Thank you to the Goodreads First Reads program for a paperback copy of this book.

[Zac Dragan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly on the shoulders of giants. Hats off to the people that keep you and your parents alive for an extra 20-30 years

[Ashley Chen · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

[Nicole Chiravuri sciencegirl71⭐️ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not well written but super interesting anecdotal history of cardiovascular surgeries.

[Doninaz · Rating 5 out of 5]

My wife had a double heart valve replacement this year. I was staggered by the complexity of the procedure, the intensity of post-op monitoring, and the challenges of recovery and rehabilitation. So, I approached The Heart Healers with more than casual interest.

This beautifully written book covers the history of cardiology’s golden age. For a history, it is short but eventful; literally within my lifetime. In the seventy-five years since Dwight Harken’s removal of shrapnel from a WW II soldier’s heart, the field has propelled forward with a justifiable sense of urgency.

It is rare that a historian is positioned to write in the first person. But because author James S. Forrester, himself a pioneering cardiologist, personally knew of these historical contemporaries, he was able to relate their personalities and motivations. One, experiencing failure after failure, continued to schedule experimental surgeries until the hospital suspended his privileges. Another, afflicted with the “pain of the pioneer,” abruptly quit the profession after two failed childhood surgeries. A third, exhibiting the brio that led to his medical breakthroughs, wound up in prison.

But this steadfastness also led these remarkable innovators to follow their crazy-sounding visions and persist beyond reason to realize astounding medical breakthroughs. Once struck with a notion of the possible, they were willing to struggle through unimaginable failures. So, the book’s subtitle, “Misfits, Mavericks, and Rebels,” accurately characterizes these personalities.

Forrester’s insightful statements attest to the nature of innovation. He often states: “Chance favors the prepared mind,” and claims that pioneers won’t get it right the first time, but they will learn from their mistakes. Advancement is not a smooth progression; each step is built on painful failures.

Forrester writes with the precision of a surgeon and the compassion of one who loves his profession. He is able to introduce a sense of drama beyond the cool demeanor of a heart doctor.

He walks the reader through the profession’s advances, where complex problems are solved at each step. Early mainstay solutions included heart-lung bypass machines, defibrillators, and pacemakers.

By the early 1960s, surgeons turned their attention to heart failures caused by heart valve disease and heart muscle scarring from heart attacks.

Diagnostic capabilities emerged, such as the Cardiac Cath Lab and the Coronary Care Unit (CCU) where heart patients could get specialized care. Stents were developed to repair coronary artery narrowing, and balloon angioplasty was used to prevent re-narrowing.

More sophisticated artificial valves were developed. And, the application of balloon angioplasty to valve replacement led to TAVR, an aortic valve replacement procedure using a catheter-mounted stent with an artificial valve.

A section was devoted to the heart transplant “space race,” with the contrasting episodes of Christiaan Barnard in South Africa, and Norman Shumway at Stanford.

Attention also focused on a growing killer – coronary artery disease (CAD). While surgical procedures such as coronary bypasses had advanced, CAD causes and prevention were not well understood. New insights were needed.

The community learned about the dangers of cholesterol deposits (plaques) on the walls of coronary arteries. They studied how LDL (“bad”) cholesterol was formed and developed drugs to inhibit it. The importance of a heart-healthy diet was confirmed.

At this point, the book subtly turned to the reader’s health. The author leverages his knowledge on plaque formation to describe preventative behaviors involving diet, exercise, and the use of statin drugs. For all of the book’s technological advances, in the end our heart health custodianship is returned to us.

Forrester concludes by reflecting on his earlier experiences and lamenting for those who were born too soon to benefit from these achievements.

[Nancy Kennedy · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I saw the size of this book, I just about had a heart attack! (Or, rather, a myocardial infarction, if you want to get technical.) And James Forrester, M.D., does get technical in this book. But don't worry, he's a skilled writer, so you coast along with him as he wends his way from the pioneer days of heart surgery to the present, examining the advancements made one by one, as surgeons both brilliant and eccentric built on the discoveries of the surgeons that came before them.

Dr. Forrester tells the story of how the miracle surgeries of today got their start in the labs and operating rooms of doctors who were brave enough to think outside the box and make connections previously unmade. "Revolutions occur when happenstance opens the door just a crack, and a unique individual standing at the door glimpses a shimmering possibility that the rest of humanity has missed," he writes.

Those standing at the door include Dr. Dwight Harken, who first dared to operate during World War II on the heart, an organ previously thought to be untouchable, by devising a way to remove shrapnel. Drs. John Gibbon and Clarence Dennis teamed up with IBM to come up with a heart-lung machine. Dr. Charles Dotter and Dr. Mason Sones discovered a way to look at the inside of coronary arteries and see heart disease in the making.

But the book is not all roses and rainbows. The practice of medicine, Dr. Forrester says, is often a matter of trial and error. "In medicine," he says, "we learn more from our mistakes than from our successes. Error exposes truth." The errors he recounts shine a light on the horrors of a death on the operating table, a life cut short, children left motherless, hearts that are "too good to die," as Dr. Forrester puts it, but do indeed die anyway.

The book is dense with information and you might lose your way if you put the book down, as I did, and then pick it up again some hours or days later. I had to backtrack several times to make sense of stories that began, were interrupted with another story, and then picked back up again twelve pages later. But it's worth the effort for this fascinating history.

The only thing that disheartened me is that in his concluding chapters, Dr. Forrester optimistically gives his recipe for avoiding heart disease, and of course, it includes commitment to a better diet and exercise. Two-thirds of Americans are either overweight or obese, and no one seems able to convince people that they are digging their own graves. I know from personal experience how difficult it is to take off weight and keep it off, and I wish I - or Dr. Forrester - could convince people of the worth of the effort. But few people are willing to listen. I'm glad we have authors like Dr. Forrester to add their voice to the urgency of the message.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part memoir part medical history, very interesting perspective on the history of cardiology. Basically Dr. Forrester described his career, the knowledge at that time, and then progressed through history and the innovations that developed over the course of his career...most of modern cardiology. I thought it was interesting to hear it from mostly a medical standpoint (as opposed to surgical). If you ever enjoyed listening to an old attending reminiscing about their career during morning conference, then this is the book for you. Very grandfatherly passing on his story...but in a very enjoyable way.

Of note, conspicuously absent was any significant mention of Dr. DeBakey or Dr. Cooley. Maybe it was because he only touched upon people he mostly knew personally.

[Cory M · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating overview of the history of cardiac surgery and medical cardiology. Probably needed to be trimmed down a bit, but overall very educational and enjoyable.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good general overview of the events that led to open heart surgery, ICDs, pacemakers, CABG, balloon angioplasty, coronary stenting, and CAD prevention.

[Douglass Morrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Former Chief of Cardiology at Cedars Sinai Medical Center, clinical investigator, and medical teacher, James Forrester, MD, has written a wonderful account of advances in cardiac care through the twentieth century: 'The Heart Healers – The Misfits, Mavericks, and Rebels Who Created the Greatest Medical Breakthrough of Our Lives'. Forrester includes personal stories with focused attention on many of his heroes, and some of the conundrums they resolved:
• “Since I know personally most of the doctors in this story, I should explain why I dub them ‘misfits’. It’s fascinating to me how many of them share some personality traits. They reject the common wisdom. They rely on their own intuition. In their private lives, they are risk-takers. They ignore the criticism of their peers. They persist in the face of failure. Unlike most of us, they are nonconformists and iconoclasts who refuse to knuckle under to society’s norms, regardless of the potential consequences. Does that tell us something about creativity? I think it does…”

Here are some of Dr. Forrester’s professional heroes and a sampling of the problems they solved:
• Dwight Harken, MD, Harvard surgery professor, violated the time-worn mantra to never operate on the human heart. He saved many soldiers’ lives in World War II by removing shrapnel (that otherwise could have caused blood clots and/ or infection) from their beating hearts. Forrester tells readers that Harken’s battlefield surgery success accrued from his being decisive, fast, and having excellent surgical technique.
• Dr. Charles Bailey of Philadelphia used a small incision through a purse-string suture (copied from Harken) to admit the surgeon’s finger into the patient’s beating heart; he then pulled the suture tight around his finger to avoid exsanguination. Bailey used his gloved finger to bluntly fracture the patient’s fused mitral valve (mitral valvotomy) to treat post-rheumatic fever, mitral stenosis. Bailey had a number of patient deaths before finally succeeding in his operation, which provided durable relief of the patients’ mitral stenosis.
• Dr. Wilfred Bigelow experimented with hypothermia to perform heart surgery on dogs.
• C. Walton Lillehei, MD, in Minnesota, began the use of 'cross-circulation' as a living form of heart-lung bypass. He first used two dogs to keep one alive during cardiac arrest, with cardiopulmonary circulation provided by the other animal. He operated on a patient by using a 'cross-circulation' from a family member.
• Jack Gibbon, MD in Philadelphia, was a pioneer in the development of the heart-lung bypass machine, solving 3 main problems: oxygenation of the patient’s blood; avoiding clots in any part of the machine; while protecting the fragile red blood cells that carry oxygen.
• Viking Bjork, MD, in Sweden, was among the developers of the membrane oxygenator using a film of blood in a stream of oxygen.
• John Kirklin, MD, at the Mayo Clinic, popularized the development and use of early membrane-oxygenator, heart-lung bypass machines. Forrester reports that Kirklin’s operative mortality was 50% in 1955, 20% in 1956, and 10% by 1957, demonstrating the gradual improvements in machine and methods, and the high risk in the early days of heart surgery.
• Carl Wiggers in Cleveland performed basic animal model studies of ventricular fibrillation, using a shock through two paddles across the heart, to defibrillate this uniformly fatal arrhythmia.
• Claude Beck defibrillated a human in the operating room. For a time, only open-heart defibrillation was attempted.
• Paul Zoll, MD, in Boston, began studying the electrical activity of the human heart and developed an external form of pacemaking. As Forrester writes, “Zoll had taken three steps. He had proven that electrical stimuli could cause the heart to contract. He had proven these stimuli could be delivered safely without touching the heart through the chest wall. And… he had proven that the human heart rate could be controlled by a machine.”
• With the encouragement of Minnesota surgeon, Walton Lillihei, engineer Earl Bakken developed a medical device business in his garage (which came to be Medtronic), and he developed an electronic pacemaker for Dr. Lillihei.
• Dr. Ake Senning at Karolinska Institute in Sweden inserted the first implantable pacemaker in 1958.
• German medical student Werner Forsmann catheterized his own right heart using a catheter he inserted through his brachial vein. Years later, Andre Cournand, MD, and Dickinson W. Richards, MD, popularized diagnostic right heart catheterization at the Bellevue (New York) Chest Service. Cournand and Richards measured heart chamber pressures and flows in many cardiac and pulmonary diseases, in a variety of physiologic settings. Forssman, Cournand, and Richards were awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology.
• Charles Dotter, MD, Portland radiologist, began injecting a bolus of dye into the aorta (aortography) to visualize the human heart (coronary) arteries. Dotter also used x-ray dye to visualize atherosclerotic stenoses in human leg arteries and pioneered the use of mechanical dilators to enlarge the lumen (channel where blood flows) of those arteries.
• Mason Sones, MD, at the Cleveland Clinic, first discovered and then popularized the selective injection of x-ray dye into the heart arteries, coronary angiography. Sones used ‘his test’ to outline the anatomy of the heart (coronary) arteries and documented the presence of atherosclerotic coronary artery disease in the form of blockages or stenoses.
• Rene Favolaro, MD, Argentinian surgeon, working with Mason Sones, at the Cleveland Clinic, popularized coronary artery bypass graft surgery, the first effective, mechanical treatment for the coronary arterial stenoses that cause myocardial ischemia or ischemic heart disease. Favolaro is widely regarded as the father of bypass surgery. Years later, after returning to his native Argentina, his clinic went bankrupt, and he committed suicide, shooting himself in the heart.
• German radiologist, Andreas Gruntzig, MD, while working in Switzerland, pioneered coronary artery balloon 'angioplasty' in awake patients. He used direct needle access to the patient’s femoral artery, through which he advanced a guiding catheter to the takeoff of the heart arteries in the aorta, and used a wire-tipped balloon to cross the stenosis that he then dilated with his balloon. He started teaching courses in Europe, then relocated to Emory University in Atlanta, where he popularized the technique of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). Thousands of physicians, including me, took Emory courses and carried the technique back to our communities.
• Geoffrey Hartzler, MD, began to apply Gruntzig’s PCI method to the care of sicker and more complex patients. Hartzler was the first to use emergency coronary angioplasty to treat patients suffering from acute coronary syndromes, including acute myocardial infarction or heart attack.
• Portland cardiac surgeon, Albert Starr, MD, worked with hydraulic engineer, Lowell Edwards, to solve multiple technical and pathophysiologic problems, ultimately producing an artificial valve for human cardiac valve replacement surgery.
• Christian Barnard, MD, figuratively working on the shoulders of his Stanford cardiac surgeon mentor, Norman Shumway, MD, performed the first human cardiac transplantation. Shumway had laid the groundwork technically and through his study of tissue rejection. Among other advances, Shumway went to Switzerland to learn of and obtain the powerful immunosuppressant drug cyclosporine. His work was fundamental to all organ transplantation.

Forrester made a particularly poignant comparison of the attitudes of two cardiac surgery pioneers, Christian Barnard, a narcissist, and Rene Favolaro, a humanist, in describing their feelings about the operative death of one of their surgical patients.
• Barnard: “… it is the ego that is hurt. I should not have a death… I’m too good for that.”
• Favolaro: “I suffer with every single death of my patients…The day that I don’t feel the sensation that I am the guilty one, then I will drop the knife and I won’t operate anymore… The deaths associated with surgery are personal and every surgeon must endure their burden as long as he lives.”

Forrester himself participated in the use of bedside diagnostic right heart catheterization (building on the work of Cournand and Richards in catheterization laboratories) in acute myocardial infarction patients. He identified and taught about hemodynamic subsets. He gives another lesson in physician humility when he describes his own guilt after he precipitated a potentially lethal arrhythmia (ventricular tachycardia) with the bedside (Swan-Ganz) catheter.
An important personal contribution of James Forrester was his encouragement and mentoring of his former trainee, Marcus DeWood, to review the Spokane experience of taking acute myocardial infarction patients emergently to the catheterization laboratory for diagnostic coronary angiography, followed by emergency coronary artery bypass graft surgery for patients with high-grade stenoses. The Spokane group was one of the only groups of cardiac surgeons and cardiologists in the world to attempt open-heart surgery for emergency 'revascularization' (create an alternative cardiac blood flow) of heart attack patients. The retrospective review of this unique experience established two important findings. First, 'acute coronary syndromes' generally and 'myocardial infarction' in particular are produced by the acute formation of an obstructing blood clot or thrombus. This fact was established by both catheterization laboratory findings and intraoperative findings. Secondly, heart attacks can be divided into two main groups based on the patient’s electrocardiogram (ECG). The group with the ECG pattern of ST-elevation usually had a complete artery blockage; salvage of these patients' heart muscle is critically time-dependent - these patients are treated with clot-dissolving (thrombolytic) drugs, or emergency PCI. The non-ST-elevation subset often had some coronary artery flow, so that they may respond to initial medical therapy that includes antiplatelet and anticoagulant drugs; coronary angiography may sometimes be performed less promptly than for ST-elevation patients. Everywhere emergency percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI, usually with scaffolding devices called stents) is used for ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI), rapid door-to-balloon time is a quality metric.

Forrester included chapters on the development of cardiac drugs in the past century. He reported on several heroes of cardiac imaging and the identification of cardiac risk factors. He described the development of preventive cardiology as a discipline. His book is a good survey of many extraordinary advances in cardiac care over the past century.

Forrester’s book, 'The Heart Healers – The Misfits, Mavericks, and Rebels Who Created the Greatest Medical Breakthrough of Our Lives', has been a treasure for me, summarizing and adding to my knowledge and appreciation of an era of cardiology, in which I was also privileged to live, practice, and study. This cardiology history, part memoir, stimulated me to write my own cardiology memoir. I recommend 'The Heart Healers – The Misfits, Mavericks, and Rebels Who Created the Greatest Medical Breakthrough of Our Lives' to cardiologists and cardiac surgeons everywhere. I think curious and motivated patients using the illustrations, footnotes, and index can learn a great deal about contemporary cardiology from this wonderful text.

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing book written in way that keeps the reader engaged. Touching personal stories of patients interweaved with the harrowing tales of how medical advances were brought to bear. Dr. Forrester is well poised to recount these tales as he has witnessed first hand, and many times personally involved, in cardiology advances throughout the years. He offers great insight into what it means to be a trainee, physician, innovator, researcher, mentor and finally, patient himself.

Other great books like this include:
- The Gene: An intimate history (Siddhartha Mukherjee)
- Saving Sam: Drugs, Race, and discovering the secrets of heart disease (Jay Cohn)
- King of Hearts: The true story of the maverick who pioneered open heart urgency (G Wayne Miller)
- The Emperor of all maladies: A biography of cancer (Siddhartha Mukherjee)
- The Sublime engine: A biography of the human heart (Stephen Amidon)
- Twelve patients: life and death at Bellevue hospital (Eric Manheimer)
- God's Hotel: A doctor, a hospital, and a pilgrimage to the heart of medicine (Victoria Sweet)
- Five quarts: A personal and natural history of blood (Bill Hayes)

[William Schram · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a superlative account of the progression of solutions for heart diseases. In The Heart Healers, Doctor James S. Forrester recounts multiple stories of people brought back from the brink of death and the patient deaths that led to more advances. From Imaging technology to statins, and Coronary Bypass Surgery to Valve Replacements, this book contains stories and accounts of many different situations.

Through the book, we follow Dr. Forrester's own developments as a Doctor. At the beginning of the book, he recounts his experiences with a man that he called Willie the Phillie. He was unable to resurrect him due to the nature of cardiac surgery at the time.

Dr. Forrester's main thesis is that it took a Maverick or Rebel to change the Paradigm in Cardiac Treatments. Around the time of World War II, no surgeon would consider operating on the heart, but then a new generation of surgeons came to the forefront of medicine and changed how things were done with their ideas and methods.

I will admit that many of the stories brought a tear to my eye. No joke.

I will certainly keep this book around to read again.

[Tahlia Fernandez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Humanity, daring, brilliance, tenacity, and sometimes sheer dumb luck... "The Heart Healers" contains it all. The tales of how we got to where we are in cardiac health is told in a narrative way that grips the reader not only with its fascinating science and history, but also with the sheer heart (pun intended) shown by so many of the innovators.
These are the unsung heroes that so many of us take for granted. They dared to go where others faltered and by gambling big, saved many lives.
This book is one will not only be fascinating for those interested in medicine, but also those interested in history... or even just a good story!
This book is easily a 4.75 stars book for me! I can see myself revisiting this book again in the future. Well worth every moment of reading time.

[Maynard Handley · Rating 1 out of 5]

Every book written by a doctor seems to follow exactly the same pattern -- occasional abstract medical details, but mostly case stories.
I don't know: maybe case stories are important for training doctors? Maybe they are beloved by most readers? But they irritate the heck out of me -- way too much unimportant fluff, way too little of the content I actually care about.

So, sorry, from me it's a hard pass. Maybe I'll eventually find a book on the subject written by someone who isn't either a doctor or (second worst type of author) a journalist...

[Roger Weinhouse · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to recommend this book with great enthusiasm. It is beautifully written and offers an incredible depth of information to lay readers and to medical professionals. Dr Forrester beautifully describes the incredible life saving developments in cardiology and allows the reader to join him in his professional career. You will not only gain a great understanding of this amazing medical speciality, but will also leave this wonderful book with life saving information concerning your personal health.

[Ashleigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent history of developments in cardiology over the last 50 years...thorough (and long), but worth the time. The author loves cardiology, and is a passionate and gifted teacher and guide thru its history. I was struck by his characterization of the innovators, those pioneers in the field who would likely be kicked out of hospitals if practicing in the current era. Innovation may be more limited with checklist medicine...

[Brianna Steelman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book and hated putting it down! It is the amazing history of cardiology, and it was an amazing experience reading this in the ER at the same time that my grandfather was in the cath lab. Also, working for a cardiologist, I got to see this history come to life everyday. For anyone remotely interested in cardiology or with heart disease, this is a must read!

[Stephen Denney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book documenting the chronology of cardiac surgery and health initiatives over the last 100 years. Nearly 650,000 Americans died from heart disease in 2016 and as such, every person should be educated in the root causes and medical options. The book reads like a historical narrative and interjects science and medicine. This makes the book readable to the non-scientist.

[Sabrina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed reading this book. I definitely expected to learn, I just didn't expect to enjoy the process. This was an extremely accessible book which provides a number of great insights into a variety of cardiac related topics. It also provided the best explanation of cholesterol risk that I have ever heard/read.

[KJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful and thoughtfully written. I do hope that when anyone is experiencing a medical catastrophe, that a doctor such as this author is there to help. The kindness and bedside manner he displays throughout is exceptional and that’s not to detract from the fantastic scientific history and breakthroughs discussed in the book.

[Kathy Parish · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating, true-life recounting of the history of modern cardiology. Even the non-scientist should be captivated by the real cases presented to illustrate each step forward. I highly recommend.

[Paula · Rating 4 out of 5]

I know I didn't know complete justice to this audiobook listening to it while I was cleaning the garage -and trying not to recheck the election results every thirty seconds-but I did learn something about the precarious history of advances in medical science so I'm going to call it a win.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was an incredibly interesting book. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and learning about the world of cardiology, medical advancement and medicine in general. At points the dialogue seemed a little made up but it’s a tiny fault and overall I’d recommend this book as it really is fascinating

[Emrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The history of medicine can be a wild one and I really enjoyed the way Dr Forrester focused on the insanely talented (and sometimes just insane) people responsible for the miracles of modern cardiology. Some day I hope to be as knowledgeable and passionate about my own career.

[Zachary Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a fascinating look at a niche topic. Along the way are tales of fascinating people, innovative ideas, bravery, and stubbornness. I recommend to anyone working on hard problems to help humanity, particularly in medicine/medical devices.

[Jackie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent history and gentle references to a myriad of human writings. Good explanation of the human heart anatomy on disc one.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really great book to give a well-rounded view of the history of cardiology and cardiac surgery.