15 Oct Recommended: “Meditating on what the heart means…” – Business Line
“I admit, I don’t spend a lot of time with medical memoirs. I begin them, and then somewhere, the science begins to shut me out, getting more and more technical as the book unfurls. But with Heart: A History by Sandeep Jauhar, I felt the science was a little more personal. My family has a history of heart complaints, and I think about my heart more at my age than my mother probably did at hers. It’s a personal thing, the heart, and in the hands of a less-gentle writer, the book could have come across as pedantic. Instead, Jauhar moves between his own history, and his family’s and the history of heart surgery and stays engaging through the book. He’s not just a doctor talking about one of your most vital organs, he’s also someone who is meditating on what the heart means, both as an organ and as a metaphor. The amount of animal experiments doctors have had to do throughout history to get us this far in medical science will probably disturb the animal lovers among you, but I’m not going to argue about ethics when it comes to saving the life of someone I love…”
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