Heart : A History By Sandeep Jauhar

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We are delighted to announce that Penguin Random House India will be publishing Heart: A History by Sandeep Jauhar, the bestselling author of Intern and Doctored, in September 2018. Heart: A History is a doctor’s inspiring obsession with the heart, seamlessly combining history, gripping scenes from the operating theatre and a moving personal story. It’s the extraordinary tale of the very thing that makes us tick.

‘Heart: A History merges technical and scientific expertise with humanity, compassion and a keen understanding of relationships. Jauhar’s critical eye, his extraordinary ability to simplify the complexities of life and death, the sheer empathy with which he puts forth his argument – all of these moved me. We do not live in an easy age – politically, environmentally, culturally or socially – and writers like Jauhar, with reason, insight and grace, lend us the capacity to look inwards, rather than outwards, to unravel the mysteries of the human heart before unravelling the world.’ – Manasi Subramaniam, Senior Commissioning Editor

The spark of life, fount of emotion, house of the soul – the heart lies at the centre of every facet of our existence. It’s so bound up in our deepest feelings that it can physically change shape when we experience emotional trauma.

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, combining his family’s own moving history of heart disease with gripping scenes from the operating theatre, Jauhar tells the colourful 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.

Sandeep Jauhar is director of the Heart Failure Program at Long Island Jewish Medical Center. He is the New York Times bestselling author of two medical memoirs and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. His first book, Intern: A Doctor’s Initiation was optioned by NBC for a dramatic television series. He lives on Long Island with his wife and their two children.

PRAISE FOR SANDEEP JAUHAR

Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician

‘The narrative is gripping, and the writing is marvellous.’ – Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies and Gene

‘An extraordinary, brave and even shocking document.’ – New York Times

‘In this absorbing memoir-cum-analysis, Sandeep Jauhar traces his years as a fledgling cardiologist against the backdrop of a healthcare system in peril… An impassioned call to action.’ – Nature

‘Highly engaging and disarmingly candid… Dr Jauhar does a service by describing eloquently the excesses and dysfunctions of patient care and the systemic distortions responsible for them.’ –Wall Street Journal

‘Bold and fascinating … [Jauhar] interweaves his personal story as well as anecdotes about his patients into a meticulously researched and painfully honest account… This beautifully written and unsparing memoir puts a human face on the vast, dysfunctional system in which patients and clinicians alike are now entangled.’ – Boston Globe

Intern: A Doctor’s Initiation

‘In Jauhar’s wise memoir of his two-year ordeal of doubt and sleep deprivation at a New York hospital, he takes readers to the heart of every young physician’s hardest test: to become a doctor yet remain a human being.’ – Time

‘Brutally frank… The inside look at the workings of the medical internship system is fascinating.’ – New York Times

‘A vivid portrait of the culture of a New York City hospital, with its demanding hierarchy and sometimes indifferent cruelty.’ – New York Times Book Review

‘Very few books can make you laugh and cry at the same time. This is one of them… [Jauhar] takes us on a wondrous journey through one of the most difficult years of his life.’ – Sanjay Gupta, CNN medical correspondent and author of Chasing Life