REVIEW
Heart - A History
Sandeep Jauhar, MD
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York 2018
Reviewed by
M. Saleem Seyal, MD, FACC, FACP
“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.”
- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662- a French mathematician, writer and Catholic theologian)
“(The heart is) the beginning of life, the Sun of the microcosm, as proportionably the Sun deserves to be called the heart of the world…. In
sum, its functions made the heart supreme in the organism, for “by nourishing, cherishing and vegetating, (the heart is) the foundation of
life, the author of all.”
- In De Motu Cordis 1628
D
r. Sandeep Jauhar is a cardiolo-
gist who serves as director of the
Heart Failure Program at Long
Island Jewish Medical Center.
He regularly wrote op-ed piec-
es for the New York Times and is a bestsell-
ing author of two previous books, Intern: A
Doctor’s Initiation (2009) and Doctored: The
Disillusionment of an American Physician (2014). Heart - A History
is his third and most ambitious book thus far that deals with the
organ that makes us tick.
In the prologue, Dr. Jauhar describes his personal symptoms of
exertional dyspnea at age 45. A CT scan of the chest showed coronary
artery calcium (CAC), and he underwent cardiac CT angiography
which showed non-obstructive coronary artery disease that did not
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LOUISVILLE MEDICINE
require catheter-based intervention, but the diagnosis of coronary
artery disease was established. He then narrates how his grandfather
at age 57 had a sudden death, most likely secondary to an acute
myocardial infarction. His older brother, Rajiv, is an interventional
cardiologist. Dr. Jauhar is a trained physicist earning his PhD but
changed his academic track to medicine and became a cardiologist.
The Heart, a spontaneously moving, beating and shuddering
meaty mass, has fascinated humans since time immemorial and
was considered to be an inscrutable and mysterious organ that
was the seat of the soul. The heart emanates emotional heat and is
untouchable. The intrigue about the heart has been expressed in
emotional, spiritual, poetic and literary dimensions by countless
physicians, sages and philosophers over the centuries. In the car-
diocentric sense, the heart has enjoyed a profoundly exalted status
and has been put on the pedestal with deep meanings and amazing