A brilliant heart surgeon whose discoveries paved the way for generations of other doctors in his field has his career and reputation torn apart. Armed with fresh and thoroughly researched information on one of the most influential - and enigmatic- figures in medicine, Goor's fascinating, insightful biography combines an understanding of both science and the politics involved in the history of the repair and healing of the human heart.
The companion book to an upcoming museum exhibition of the same name, Places of Invention seeks to answer timely questions about the nature of invention and innovation: What is it about some places that sparks invention and innovation? Is it simply being at the right place at the right time, or is it more than that? How does “place”—whether physical, social, or cultural—support, constrain, and shape innovation? Why does invention flourish in one spot but struggle in another, even very similar location? In short: Why there? Why then? Places of Invention frames current and historic conversation on the relationship between place and creativity, citing extensive scholarship in the area and two decades of investigation and study from the National Museum of American History’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. The book is built around six place case studies: Hartford, CT, late 1800s; Hollywood, CA, 1930s; Medical Alley, MN, 1950s; Bronx, NY,1970s; Silicon Valley, CA, 1970s–1980s; and Fort Collins, CO, 2010s. Interspersed with these case studies are dispatches from three “learning labs” detailing Smithsonian Affiliate museums’ work using Places of Invention as a model for documenting local invention and innovation. Written by exhibition curators, each part of the book focuses on the central thesis that invention is everywhere and fueled by unique combinations of creative people, ready resources, and inspiring surroundings. Like the locations it explores, Places of Invention shows how the history of invention can be a transformative lens for understanding local history and cultivating creativity on scales of place ranging from the personal to the national and beyond.
The bestselling author of Intern and Doctored tells the story of the thing that makes us tick For centuries, the human heart seemed beyond our understanding: an inscrutable shuddering mass that was somehow the driver of emotion and the seat of the soul. As the cardiologist and bestselling author Sandeep Jauhar shows in Heart: A History, it was only recently that we demolished age-old taboos and devised the transformative procedures that have changed the way we live. 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. He introduces us to Daniel Hale Williams, the African American doctor who performed the world’s first open heart surgery in Gilded Age Chicago. We meet C. Walton Lillehei, who connected a patient’s circulatory system to a healthy donor’s, paving the way for the heart-lung machine. And we encounter Wilson Greatbatch, who saved millions by inventing the pacemaker—by accident. 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.
At one time, heart disease was a death sentence. In The Heart Healers, world renowned cardiac surgeon 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".
This volume is the first one in a peer-reviewed series of Proceedings Volumes from the Calgary History of Medicine Days conferences, which are now produced with Cambridge Scholars Publishing. The History of Medicine Days are two-day Nation-wide conferences held annually in spring at the University of Calgary (Canada), where undergraduate and early graduate students from across Canada, the United States, United Kingdom and Europe give paper and poster presentations on a wide variety of topics from the history of medicine and health care. The selected 2009 conference papers that are assembled in this volume, particularly comprise the history of Ancient Medicine, Canadiana, Eugenics, Military Medicine, Public Health, Surgery, Diseases, as well as Sex and Gender perspectives. Distinguished Professor of Biology and Chair of the History of Biology Program at Washington University in St. Louis (USA), Dr. Garland E. Allen, held the 2009 keynote address at the conference. His topic “Evolution, Genetics and Eugenics: The Misuse of Biological Theory, 1900–1945” was largely based on an earlier article in the scholarly journal Endeavour. With the permission of the author and editors-in-chief of Endeavour, this article could be reprinted in the current volume where it represents the 2009 keynote address. This volume also includes the abstracts of all 2009 conference presentations and is well-illustrated with diagrams and images pertaining to the history of medicine.
Great innovations take place within great institutions. Founded in 1819, Toronto General Hospital (TGH) is one of Canada’s oldest hospitals and has created a nurturing environment for early Canadian innovations in heart surgery. The Heartbeat of Innovation tells the story of the brilliant surgeons who worked there and the hospital environment that provided an incubator to the many people – skilled perfusionists, dedicated nurses, and pioneering cardiologists – who participated in the revolution in heart surgery that took place along University Avenue in Toronto. Supported by historical records, hospital archives, personal memoirs, and interviews, this book is an extensive and descriptive account of the seemingly inexorable development of cardiac surgery at this leading academic health science centre. It pursues several themes: the complexity of this surgical specialty, its generally male-dominated nature, the trend toward teamwork in practice, and the evolution and incorporation of original research into this branch of healthcare. These strands are woven together to demonstrate how the TGH has evolved into such a dominant leader in the competitive and demanding field of cardiac surgery. Canadian hearts may beat with pride at the knowledge that one of the major stories in modern medicine took place here – and continues here.
This book analyzes scientific problems within the history of physics, engineering, chemistry, astronomy and medicine, correlated with technological applications in the social context. When and how is tension between disciplines explicitly practised? What is the conceptual bridge between science researches and the organization of technological researches in the development of industrial applications? The authors explain various ways in which the sciences allowed advanced modelling on the one hand, and the development of new technological ideas on the other hand. An emphasis on the role played by mechanisms, production methods and instruments bestows a benefit on historical and scientific discourse: theories, institutions, universities, schools for engineers, social implications as well. Scholars from different traditions discuss the emergency style of thinking in methodology and, in theoretical perspective, aim to gather and re-evaluate the current thinking on this subject. It brings together contributions from leading experts in the field, and gives much-needed insight into the subject from a historical point of view. The volume composition makes for absorbing reading for historians, philosophers and scientists.
Cardiac Cowboys is the dramatic story of five deeply flawed geniuses who together—and in competition with each other—invented open-heart surgery against all conventional medical wisdom and saved millions of lives. A decade after World War II, there was still no such thing as open-heart surgery, and yet half a million Americans were dying from heart disease every year. One in a hundred children would suffer and die from congenital heart disease as well, and doctors did little other than predict their deaths. After the first daring operation in 1954 and through the next three decades, five heroic surgeons braved the scorn of their peers, withstood fierce desperation, and faced possible death in order to devise procedures that would save overwhelming numbers of those doomed children and provide hope for a new life to all manner of heart-failing individuals. Devising and mastering heart transplants and bypass surgery, they invented artificial heart valves, the lifesaving pacemaker, and worked toward the holy grail of an artificial heart as their private and professional lives imploded. The story of the Cardiac Cowboys, their outsized personalities, and often self-destructive behavior is a saga more thrilling and exhilarating than fiction.
Few of the great stories of medicine are as palpably dramatic as the invention of open-heart surgery, yet, until now, no journalist has ever brought all of the thrilling specifics of this triumph to life. This is the story of the surgeon many call the father of open-heart surgery, Dr. C. Walton Lillehei, who, along with colleagues at University Hospital in Minneapolis and a small band of pioneers elsewhere, accomplished what many experts considered to be an impossible feat: He opened the heart, repaired fatal defects, and made the miraculous routine. Acclaimed author G. Wayne Miller draws on archival research and exclusive interviews with Lillehei and legendary pioneers such as Michael DeBakey and Christiaan Barnard, taking readers into the lives of these doctors and their patients as they progress toward their landmark achievement. In the tradition of works by Richard Rhodes and Tracy Kidder, King of Hearts tells the story of an important and gripping piece of forgotten science history.
