For thousands of years the human heart remained the deepest of mysteries; both home to the soul and an organ too complex to touch, let alone operate on. Then, in the late nineteenth century, medics began going where no one had dared go before. The following decades saw the mysteries of the heart exposed, thanks to pioneering surgeons, brave patients and even sacrificial dogs. In eleven landmark operations, Thomas Morris tells us stories of triumph,...

"Mimi Swartz takes readers behind the scenes of perhaps the greatest medical and technological quest of our time, as she follows pioneering heart surgeon O.H. "Bud" Frazier and his partner, Dr. Billy Cohn, in Frazier's lifelong effort to develop, perfect, and successfully implant an artificial heart in patients whose hearts are failing. In Ticker, renowned journalist Mimi Swartz takes readers on an incredible behind-the-scenes journey into a heart...

Tells the emotional true story of two men who defined the rules of their time to launch a medical revolution, set against the backdrop of the Jim Crow south. Working in 1940s Baltimore on an unprecedented technique for performing heart surgery on "blue babies", Dr. Alfred Blalock and lab technician Vivien Thomas from an impressive team. As Blalock and Thomas invent a new field of medicine, saving thousands of lives in the process, social pressures...