17 Sep ‘Heart: A History’ Review: At the Bleeding Edge – Wall Street Journal
“The cardiologist Sandeep Jauhar has become a Dante of modern medicine, with his earlier memoirs, Intern (2008) and Doctored (2014), casting the progress from training to career as a path studded with suffering, indignity and ethical hazard. His latest book, Heart: A History, is something of a Paradiso, pointing to the field’s brightest and noblest stars while recognizing just how much darkness is still left in the firmament.
Contemporary cardiology, Dr. Jauhar notes, is coming off a perhaps unrepeatable century of success. Since 1950, deaths from cardiovascular disease have declined by 60% in the U.S.—meaning that, every year, more than a million Americans who would have died under midcentury care survive. Today a host of advances—drugs that lower cholesterol and blood pressure, implantable defibrillators, catheterizations to unclog arteries, and even heart transplants—have turned many forms of heart disease into manageable illnesses rather than death sentences…”
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