The Heart Healers: The Misfits, Mavericks, and Rebels Who Created the Greatest Medical Breakthrough of Our Lives
James Forrester, M.D.
Sep 2015 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Jonathan Yen
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15 hr 45 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
At one time, heart disease was a death sentence. By the middle of the twentieth century, it was killing millions and, as with the Black Death centuries before, physicians stood helpless. Visionaries, though, had begun to make strides earlier. On September 7, 1895, Ludwig Rehn successfully sutured the heart of a living man with a knife wound to the chest for the first time. 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. And 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 and saved his life, and thus the term "cardiac surgeon" was born.
In The Heart Healers, James Forrester, MD, 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."
At one time, heart disease was a death sentence. By the middle of the twentieth century, it was killing millions and, as with the Black Death centuries before, physicians stood helpless. Visionaries, though, had begun to make strides earlier. On September 7, 1895, Ludwig Rehn successfully sutur...
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About the author
James Forrester, MD, is a world-renowned cardiac surgeon and the former chief of the Division of Cardiology at Cedars-Sinai. In addition, he is a professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. James lives in Malibu, California, with his wife.
Jonathan Yen was inspired by the Golden Age of Radio, and while the gold was gone by the time he got there, he's carried that inspiration through to commercial work, voice acting, and stage productions. From vintage Howard Fast science fiction to naturalist Paul Rosolie's true adventures in the Amazon, Jonathan loves to tell a good story.
James Forrester, MD, is a world-renowned cardiac surgeon and the former chief of the Division of Cardiology at Cedars-Sinai. In addition, he is a professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. James lives in Malibu, California, with his ...
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