Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Society & Social Sciences

THE MAN WHO TOUCHED HIS OWN HEART

Rob Dunn

True Tales of Science, Surgery, and Mystery

The Man Who Touched His Own Heart tells the raucous, gory, mesmerizing story of the heart, from the first "explorers" who dug up cadavers and plumbed their hearts' chambers, through the first heart surgeries-which had to be completed in three minutes before death arrived-to heart transplants and the latest medical efforts to prolong our hearts' lives, almost defying nature in the process.

The title story is about the first surgeon to perform a heart catheterization—but the story is better than that, since he did it to himself after literally tying down the nurse who thought he would probably kill himself and tried to stop him. The book is roughly chronological, going from mummies (which have proved that ancient Egyptians’ arteries clogged as frequently as ours) to Leonardo DaVinci cutting up cadavers to figure out how the heart works, to scientists learning that most living organisms only get 1 billion beats - and by prolonging our lives with medicine to get 2 billion, we live to be older than the 40 years we should get—effectively getting an “extra life”.

Rob Dunn is a biologist and the author of Every Living Thing and The Wild Life Of Our Bodies, which was included on three "best of the year" roundups: The Wilson Quarterly's top ten books of 2011, Booklist Online's Top Ten Health and Wellness Books, and PopScienceBooks' five best biology books of 2011. He is also one of the most prolific recipients of 7 figure science grants in the country, because of his ability to make science sing – which is exactly what he does in this book.

Available products
Book Published 2015-02-01 by Little Brown
Book Published 2015-02-01 by Little Brown

Comments

We've all got to have heart, and Rob Dunn's wonderful book will help us have a better one...

This delightful book is a page-turner, whose pulse never slows. In Dunn's hands, the evolution and history of the human heart is as engrossing, surprising, and vital as the heart itself.

Holland: Contact Russia: AST

In this story of one of the body parts I worry about most, Rob Dunn brings the skills of a great writer and the knowledge of a fine evolutionary biologist together in the form of a gripping drama that gallops across thousands of years and from graveyard to surgical theatre to modern doctor's office. In the process Dunn sheds light not just on our own hearts but also those of all of the other animals with which we share Earth.

A perfect mix of science, history and biology, The Man Who Touched His Own Heart is a delightful page-turner that reminds us of all that we have learned by standing on the shoulders of giants. Dunn recognizes the importance of historical and comparative perspectives—historical in terms of our intellectual ancestors, and more broadly in terms of our evolutionary history.