Heart Stories

When I graduated from medical school, a third of heart attack victims died at home or in the hospital. Heart rhythm disorders were killing or crippling hundreds of thousands of Americans every year. Severe heart failure was a death sentence. Preventive cardiology was practically unknown: the significance of high cholesterol was being debated, 50 percent of adults were smoking cigarettes, and high blood pressure was usually undetected and often poorly controlled. All of this changed for the better---much better---during the 47 years I practiced medicine and cardiology. I wrote this book for everyone. I wrote it to educate readers and to show future generations what it took to throttle the epidemic of heart disease that exploded in the 20th century. Patient stories are the centerpiece of this narrative. Their stories and the dialogues are fictionalized but they are based on actual patients, experiences, and my best recollections. I have interwoven these patient stories with the stories of the actual physicians, scientists, and engineers whose brilliance and determination brought my patients relief from pain and suffering. They were as personally different from each other as a fiction writer could make them. But all of them approached their work with three critical attributes: creativity, passion, and tenacity. This book is not intended to be a history of cardiology or heart surgery. It chronicles what I saw, experienced, and felt during this golden age of cardiovascular care.