Sandeep Jauhar, MD, PhD, is the director of the Heart Failure Program at Long Island Jewish Medical Center. He is the author of Doctored and Intern. A practicing cardiologist, Jauhar has been writing regularly about medicine for The New York Times since 1998. Heart: A History (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), his latest book, is a scientific history, as well as a personal story. It tells the colorful and little-known story of the doctors who risked their careers and the patients who risked their lives to know and heal our most vital organ. Deftly alternating between key historical episodes and his own work, Jauhar tells the colorful and little-known story of the doctors who risked their careers and the patients who risked their lives to know and heal our most vital organ. Jauhar deftly braids these tales of discovery, hubris, and sorrow with moving accounts of his family’s history of heart ailments and the patients he’s treated over many years. He also confronts the limits of medical technology, arguing that future progress will depend more on how we choose to live than on the devices we invent. Affecting, engaging, and beautifully written, Heart: A History takes the full measure of the only organ that can move itself.
