The Curious History of the Heart
The Curious History of the Heart

Author: Vincent M. Figueredo

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2023-04-04

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 0231557302

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Gold Award Winner, 2024 Nonfiction Book Awards Runner-up, 2024 History category, San Francisco Book Festival Runner-up, 2024 General Non-Fiction, New York Book Festival For much of recorded history, people considered the heart to be the most important organ in the body. In cultures around the world, the heart—not the brain—was believed to be the location of intelligence, memory, emotion, and the soul. Over time, views on the purpose of the heart have transformed as people sought to understand the life forces it contains. Modern medicine and science dismissed what was once the king of the organs as a mere blood pump subservient to the brain, yet the heart remains a potent symbol of love and health and an important part of our cultural iconography. This book traces the evolution of our understanding of the heart from the dawn of civilization to the present. Vincent M. Figueredo—an accomplished cardiologist and expert on the history of the human heart—explores the role and significance of the heart in art, culture, religion, philosophy, and science across time and place. He examines how the heart really works, its many meanings in our emotional and daily lives, and what cutting-edge science is teaching us about this remarkable organ. Figueredo considers the science of heart disease, recent advancements in heart therapies, and what the future may hold. He highlights the emerging field of neurocardiology, which has found evidence of a “heart-brain connection” in mental and physical health, suggesting that ancient views hold more truth than moderns suspect. Ranging widely and deeply throughout human history, this book sheds new light on why the heart remains so central to our sense of self.

Heart: A History
Heart: A History

Author: Sandeep Jauhar

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2018-09-18

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0374717001

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.

State of the Heart
State of the Heart

Author: Haider Warraich

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2019-07-23

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1250169712

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In State of the Heart, Dr. Haider Warraich takes readers inside the ER, inside patients' rooms, and inside the history and science of cardiac disease. State of the Heart traces the entire arc of the heart, from the very first time it was depicted on stone tablets, to a future in which it may very well become redundant. While heart disease has been around for a while, the type of heart disease people have, why they have it, and how it’s treated is changing. Yet, the golden age of heart science is only just beginning. And with treatments of heart disease altering the very definitions of human life and death, there is no better time to look at the present and future of heart disease, the doctors and nurses who treat it, the patients and caregivers who live with it, and the stories they hold close to their chests. More people die of heart disease than any other disease in the world and when any form of heart disease progresses, it can result in the development of heart failure. Heart failure affects millions and can affect anyone at anytime, a child recovering from a viral infection, a woman who has just given birth or a cancer patient receiving chemotherapy. Yet new technology to treat heart failure is fundamentally changing just what it means to be human. Mechanical pumps can be surgically sown into patients’ hearts and when patients with these pumps get really sick, sometimes they don’t need a doctor or a surgeon—they need a mechanic. In State of the Heart, the journey to rid the world of heart disease is shown to be reflective of the journey of medical science at large. We are learning not only that women have as much heart disease as men, but that the type of heart disease women experience is diametrically different from that in men. We are learning that heart disease and cancer may have more in common than we could have imagined. And we are learning how human evolution itself may have led to the epidemic of heart disease. In understanding how our knowledge of the heart evolved, State of the Heart traces the twisting and turning road that science has taken—filled with potholes and blind turns—all the way back to its very origin.

The Matter of the Heart
The Matter of the Heart

Author: Thomas Morris

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2017-06-01

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 1473524725

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

'Thrilling... The “dizzying” story of heart surgery is every bit as important as that of the nuclear, computer or rocket ages. And now it has been given the history it deserves' James McConnachie, Sunday Times For thousands of years the human heart remained the deepest of mysteries; both home to the soul and an organ too complex to touch, let alone operate on. Then, in the late nineteenth century, medics began going where no one had dared go before. In eleven landmark operations, Thomas Morris tells us stories of triumph, reckless bravery, swaggering arrogance, jealousy and rivalry, and incredible ingenuity, from the trail-blazing ‘blue baby’ procedure to the first human heart transplant. The Matter of the Heart gives us a view over the surgeon’s shoulder, showing us the heart’s inner workings and failings. It describes both a human story and a history of risk-taking that has ultimately saved millions of lives.

Heart
Heart

Author: Gail Godwin

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2002-02-05

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 0380808412

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

What is the heart? We know it as not only the beating thing in our chests that sustains life, but as the wellspring of all faith, hope, and love. In this remarkable book, critically acclaimed author Gail Godwin takes us on a breathtaking journey that spans the history of human civilization, combining myth, art and religion to understand how humans have conceived of the heart through time. From the first valentine to the first stethoscope, from the Ancient Egyptians to the Buddha, from the heart of darkness to heart-to-heart talks, Godwin weaves her own stories of heartbreak and hope through it all. Inspired by the richest of lore, Godwin ultimately arrives at what every culture must discover anew: we cannot let the head alone rule our lives. In this colorful history of the organ of life itself, she discovers a template for a more heart-filled life.

Crossroads
Crossroads

Author: Don Adams

Publisher:

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The authors look at the possibilities for the politics of culture and the culture of politics in the United States in the nineties. They argue for pluralism, participation and equity in culture and community life.

Musings on Medicine, Myth, and History
Musings on Medicine, Myth, and History

Author: V. K. Raju

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2018-04-25

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 9781987641905

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Musings on Medicine, Myth, and History: India's Legacy is a collection of fourteen short essays. It presents a holistic view of ancient medical history and Indian developments in ophthalmology, the authors' medical specialty. Deep respect for their homeland is apparent, as is their concern for sighted and visually impaired patients at home in the United States or on service trips abroad. Readers may be surprised to learn that cataract surgery was first described and performed in India nearly three thousand years ago. Much of current practice in ophthalmology can be traced to medical pioneers in Ancient India. This book is sure to broaden your perspective of India's contributions to modern health care. But also, in the process, you will become better acquainted with many other aspects of India, which was once the world's leading economic "superpower."

The Amorous Heart
The Amorous Heart

Author: Marilyn Yalom

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2018-01-09

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0465094716

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An eminent scholar unearths the captivating history of the two-lobed heart symbol from scripture and tapestry to T-shirts and text messages, shedding light on how we have expressed love since antiquity The symmetrical, exuberant heart is everywhere: it gives shape to candy, pendants, the frothy milk on top of a cappuccino, and much else. How can we explain the ubiquity of what might be the most recognizable symbol in the world? In The Amorous Heart, Marilyn Yalom tracks the heart metaphor and heart iconography across two thousand years, through Christian theology, pagan love poetry, medieval painting, Shakespearean drama, Enlightenment science, and into the present. She argues that the symbol reveals a tension between love as romantic and sexual on the one hand, and as religious and spiritual on the other. Ultimately, the heart symbol is a guide to the astonishing variety of human affections, from the erotic to the chaste and from the unrequited to the conjugal.

A Man Comes from Someplace
A Man Comes from Someplace

Author: Judith Pearl Summerfield

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-07-17

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 9004370978

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A Man Comes from Someplace is a story of a lost world, a story in history of a multi-generational Jewish family from a shtetl in Ukraine before WWI. As cultural study, the narrative draws upon the oral stories of the author’s father, family letters, eyewitness accounts, immigration papers, etc., and cultural research. The narrative becomes a transformative space to re-present story as performance, a meta-narrative, and an auto-ethnography for the author to reflect upon the effects of the stories on her own life, as daughter of a survivor, and as teacher/scholar. Summerfield raises questions about immigration, survival, resilience, place and identity, how story functions as antidote to trauma, a means of making sense of the world, and as resistance, the refusal to be silenced or erased, the insistence we know the past and remember those who came before. In 2011, she found her way back to the place her family came from in Ukraine. The book is now being read by students in their ESL classes in Novokoonstantinov, Ukraine.

The Curious History of Dating
The Curious History of Dating

Author: Nichi Hodgson

Publisher: Robinson

Published: 2017-01-26

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1472138058

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A LIGHT-HEARTED, INTIMATE AND EMPHATICALLY FEMINIST HISTORY OF DATING 'A new approach to romance . . . The heroines of Regency novels could teach today's young women a trick or two' Sunday Times 'Entertaining and well-researched' The Lady 'Pacey, intelligent and authoritative with bags of wit' Law Gazette 'A whistle-stop tour of dating through history' History Extra What if Mr Darcy had simply been able to swipe right? Dating has never been easy. The road to true love has always been rutted with heartbreak, but do we have it any easier today? How did Victorians 'come out'? How did love blossom in war-torn Europe? And why did 80s' video-dating never take off? Bursting with little-known facts and tantalising tales of lovelorn men and besotted women, Nichi Hodgson's intriguing history of amorous relationships, from enamoured Georgians to frenziedly swiping millennials (and everyone in between) may leave you grateful that you live - and love - today.