About this item
At one time, heart disease was a death sentence. In The Heart Healers, world renowned cardiologist Dr. James Forrester tells the story of the mavericks and rebels who defied the accumulated medical wisdom of the day to begin conquering heart disease. By the middle of the 20th century, heart disease was killing millions and, as with the Black Death centuries before, physicians stood helpless. Visionaries, though, had begun to make strides earlier. On Sept. 7, 1895, Ludwig Rehn successfully sutured the heart of a living man with a knife wound to the chest for the first time. Once it was deemed possible to perform surgery on the heart, others followed. In 1929, Dr. Werner Forssman inserted a cardiac catheter in his own arm and forced the x-ray technician on duty to take a photo as he successfully threaded it down the vein into his own heart.
About the Author
James S. Forrester, MD, is the George Burns and Gracie Allen Emeritus Professor of Cardiology, former Chief of Cardiology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center Los Angeles, and Professor of Medicine at the UCLA School of Medicine. Early in his career he developed a bedside way of treating heart attack patients, called the Forrester classification, which revolutionized the care of critically ill patients. Later he developed an approach to diagnostic heart tests, called the Diamond-Forrester method, which is used worldwide in cardiology [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_S._Forrester_(cardiologist) ]. He has served as mentor to several hundred cardiologists, a number of whom became international leaders in heart disease. He has published over 400 full-length scientific manuscripts, been an invited visiting professor at many of the nation's leading medical universities, and given a thousand national and international cardiovascular lectures. He is the second-ever recipient of the 40,000 member American College of Cardiology's Lifetime Achievement Award, its highest honor. In 2013 his former mentees posted a video tribute on YouTube. [https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=rtgDr6_oGGk].
